
ass. 



Book 



Copyright N?. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



House Health 



House Health 

AND OTHER PAPERS 

BY 

NORMAN ^RIDGE, M.D. 

Author of " The Penalties of Taste," 
"The Rewards of Taste," etc. 




NEW YORK 

DUFFIELD & COMPANY 

MCMVII 



VV 



*Vi 



COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY 
DITFFIELD & COMPANY 

Published, August, 1907 



L; t vifcRYofCON«3R?SS 
Two Cooies Received 

SEP 12 »90f 

CLASfcA KXc 

/S6623 

COPY B. 



v 7 

., N6. 



THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

House Health i 

Human Talk 21 

The Blind Side of the Average Parent . 55 

Some Commencement Ideals .... 93 

A Domestic Clearing House .... 121 

The True Gospel of Sleep .... 143 

Some Unconceded Rights of Parents and 

Children 163 

The Trained Nurse and the Larger Life . 187 



House Health 



House Health 



Despite all effort to the contrary people 
will occasionally fall sick. There are two ca- 
lamities that we seem powerless wholly to 
prevent; namely, the occasional burning of 
our houses and the frequent sicknesses of our 
mortal bodies. Many of us try at great care 
and expense and with varying wisdom and 
ignorance to stand off these evils, and with 
differing success. 

Disease is most prevalent among the poor, 
especially the very poor. This is largely due 
to their unhygienic lives; and much of this 
latter is represented by their unsanitary dwell- 
ings, by their extreme and often needless ex- 
posure to certain causes of disease, by lack of 
proper food, and by the debilitating personal 
habits of some of them. The personal habits 
of the average rich, however, are nearly as 
potent in producing disease. 

3 



HOUSE HEALTH 

The influences that cause these conditions 
are presumably not numerous, and they are 
easily catalogued. First is bad ventilation of 
houses, especially in cold weather. Most of 
even the rich, who do not need to be terrified 
by their coal bills, live with insufficient ventila- 
tion of their dwellings. More than 1,000 cubic 
feet of fresh air per hour for each person 
should enter the house for even fair ventila- 
tion. Not one house in a thousand in cold 
weather fulfills this condition, or a quarter 
of it; and hardly a single house among the 
poor, unless it is unavoidable by reason of 
cracks and other openings that cannot be 
stopped. The rule is to batten up every crack 
and stop every opening. Weather strips are 
wrongly supposed to be a necessity in every 
house in cold climates. If not weather strips, 
then rags, paper, or old clothes are used — any- 
thing to keep out every current of fresh air. 

The bad air causes disease in various ways, 
chiefly by first producing debility and lessened 
power of resistance to the various microbic en- 
emies that are always waiting to stab the body 
at its most vulnerable point. Thus easily fol- 
low colds, poor digestion, and all its attendant 
ills, while several infectious diseases develop 
most easily. The power for work is also im- 
paired, and so come lessened wages with a 
4 



HOUSE HEALTH 

reduction of food and other comforts. The 
contagious diseases are always more prevalent 
as well as more fatal in cold weather, because 
the living poison that causes them is concen- 
trated in unventilated rooms, and the victims 
take in large doses thereof. It is safe to say 
that the breathing of bad air produces, di- 
rectly and indirectly, more disease, especially 
among the poor, than all other influences com- 
bined. 

Perhaps second in importance is the danger 
from disease germs entering the body in wa- 
ter, milk, and other foods, most of which 
germs have been expelled from the bodies of 
the sick. Of these the tuberculous and the ty- 
phoid germs are the most important. Nu- 
merous epidemics of typhoid fever have been 
definitely traced to food and water, and they 
were, we now know, substantially all of them 
avoidable. 

The dust that rises from carpets, rugs, and 
hangings in houses is a prolific source of dis- 
ease, especially of tuberculosis. Bacilli of tu- 
berculosis in the sputum of the sick, and dis- 
ease germs of other kinds and from other 
sources, lodge on such objects, chiefly the car- 
pets and rugs, and, as dust, are thrown into 
the air by every footfall or movement of these 
things. Where the ventilation is abundant, 
5 



HOUSE HEALTH 

as in the open houses of summer, the danger 
is least, but in the dwellings of the poor in 
cold weather there is little or no ventilation, 
and this cause of disease has there its most 
sweeping and fatal effects. Tuberculosis is 
enormously prevalent. Numerous cases may- 
originate from a single house where a bad 
case has been harbored. One after another 
the susceptible occupants of the house take the 
disease, each having inhaled the bacilli left by 
his predecessor, and each in turn leaving his 
own contribution toward the destruction of 
those who come after him. And all this des- 
olation results from the ignorance or apathy 
of the people, mostly the ignorance and the 
apathy. 

Flies and mosquitoes often bring disease to 
people. Flies carry typhoid germs on their be- 
smeared feet from infected body excretions to 
our food supply ; they also distribute tubercu- 
losis in similar ways, while malaria and yellow 
fever among the diseases are, in the light of 
our present-day knowledge, solely distributed 
by certain varieties of mosquitoes. 

A fourth cause of disease is poor food, often 
poorly, even foolishly prepared, and too much 
stimulation. People mostly cook and other- 
wise prepare their foods for the pleasure of 
their taste, which in itself is proper, for it 
6 



HOUSE HEALTH 

helps digestion, but they pay little attention 
to the need of cooking for the digestibility of 
foods and the getting of the greatest amount 
of nourishment out of them and into the tis- 
sues of the body. So appetite is conserved, if 
not worshiped, while indigestion is brought 
on and physical depreciation as a conse- 
quence. Hence, much sickness comes and 
lowering of the standard of vigor of the race. 
Vast quantities of stimulants (tea, coffee, to- 
bacco, and alcoholics) are taken for the same 
reason — because the people like the immediate 
effect of pleasure they produce, not for any 
lasting benefit, for there is none. Similarly 
they indulge in various other physical excesses 
for the immediate pleasure of them, and often 
to their permanent harm. 

Great benefit in more comforts and less 
sickness would come to people by better 
housing and hygiene. The needed reforms 
are few in number and they are not expen- 
sive, but some of them are so radical in char- 
acter as to appear to conservative minds revo- 
lutionary. 

The first reform to be thought of is not 
better houses, but better ventilation of houses, 
such as they are, and especially of sleeping 
rooms. It matters, perhaps, little which of 
several methods of ventilation is resorted to, 
7 



HOUSE HEALTH 

but a natural method for the poor is of cheap 
construction of houses with the main floor 
well above the ground, and with numerous 
cracks and crannies for the admission of air. 
Plastering is not essential; board walls will 
do, even rather loose board walls. Weather 
strips are, as usually employed, an enemy of 
the race; the poverty that sometimes deprives 
us of them is life giving. No attempt should 
be made to keep the house heat above 6o° or 
65 ° F. People, young and old, can endure this 
easily when they are accustomed to it, and 
they should, as they easily can, learn to enjoy 
it. Vicious, indeed, is the habit of keeping 
room temperature in cold weather at 80 ° 
or above. The usual amount of fuel may well 
be used in winter, the lower temperature rep- 
resenting better ventilation. And the better 
air to breathe will enable the inmates of a 
house to endure the lower temperature with- 
out discomfort. The only other provision 
necessary is, in the case of the weakly ones, 
more clothing of the person, especially of the 
feet and legs. 

The sleeping rooms should never be closed 
against the admission of fresh air. To say the 
night is cold is never a reason for shutting 
out all ventilation through the windows. Ar- 
tificial heat is not needed in the sleeping rooms 
8 



HOUSE HEALTH 

of well people, but is usually a harm. It is 
perfectly possible to fix any well person in 
bed so that he can sleep in comfort in a cold 
room, even with zero temperature. If the bed- 
clothes are scanty a few newspapers laid be- 
tween the blankets will take the place of quilts 
and keep the sleeper warm. 

I know it will be said by some critics that 
such a program as this is cruel and imprac- 
ticable, but the success of the modern treat- 
ment of tuberculosis by the outdoor, pure air 
management has shown that it is easy for del- 
icate patients to endure such measures, not 
merely with comfort but with great pleasure 
as well as benefit. And if a consumptive can 
do it, certainly it ought to be easy for other 
invalids and for the well people to thrive 
upon it. 

The bedroom air should be so pure always 
that, to the nostrils of a person coming in 
from out of doors, it will never seem stuffy; 
and over the faces of the sleepers the air 
should never be still — still air means breath- 
ing marty times over the pollution of one's 
own respiration — in other words one should 
always be in a draught, never out of it ; there 
is no other safe rule. A draught of air does 
not produce colds ; it prevents them. Colds 
come of lowered vitality, fatigue, indigestion, 
9 



HOUSE HEALTH 

and disease-producing germs that abound in 
confined house air. 

Consumptives even sleep out of doors and 
in tents with the flaps open, in zero weather, 
and with the greatest satisfaction. This lat- 
ter has been done during several recent win- 
ters in some colonies of tuberculous patients 
in northern States, and not one of them suf- 
fered injury from the experience. The only 
artificial heat the tents had was that of ker- 
osene stoves or small wood stoves, with fire 
only while the occupants were undressing for 
bed at night, and while they were dressing in 
the morning. The patients in some of these 
resorts have had the option of sleeping in 
houses during the coldest weather, but elected 
to stay in their tents. 

In order to conserve health to the greatest 
degree possible, houses should be free from 
carpets, rugs, cloth hangings, and upholstered 
furniture. Only so radical a rule as this can 
minimize to the utmost the distribution of dust 
poisons to the inmates. If the floors are cov- 
ered at all, it had best be with linoleum or 
some other material with a flat surface, free 
from meshes, and thus incapable of hiding 
dust. The best covering of all is good paint, 
renewed if possible every year. Nor does such 
absence of the customary so-called comforts 

10 



HOUSE HEALTH 

in the house need to lessen seriously the real 
physical enjoyment of living within it ; its chief 
disadvantage is in the violation of custom, the 
outrage upon fashion, the refuge from which 
is courage and independence. But there is 
growing now a fashion to do without these 
disease-spreading luxuries, as the cult of bet- 
ter ventilation and outdoor life, and sleeping 
out of doors, is increasing rapidly among the 
most thoughtful. So rapidly is this fashion 
spreading that it is likely, by its benefits to 
the physical lives of our people, to increase 
their average longevity to a degree that will, 
within two decades, actually show in the cen- 
sus figures. 

One luxury the poor man should have is 
screens for his windows and doors, in summer 
time, against the flies and mosquitoes. The 
screens are more than paid for by the lessened 
annoyance, to say nothing of the protection 
against disease, which is a positive benefit. 
The prevention, in the day time, of the inocu- 
lation of his food with disease germs by the 
flies of summer, returns many fold the cost 
of the few inexpensive screens of wire or 
cotton netting that cover the door and win- 
dow openings ; and fencing out the mosquitoes 
for the comfort of the night increases the 
sleep of the house occupants, to the great 
II 



HOUSE HEALTH 

benefit of their health, temper, and working 
capacity. 

That these insect pests distribute among the 
people at least four infectious diseases has 
been demonstrated beyond question ; and there 
is strong reason to suspect that further investi- 
gation will show that still other diseases, which 
have long puzzled the pathologists, are dis- 
seminated in this way. 

The average layman is almost wholly un- 
informed of the importance of fencing these 
insects out of his house. There needs to be 
a concerted missionary movement of educa- 
tion in this direction, by those who know, in 
the interest of those who do not know. The 
relatively trifling cost of this protection keeps 
thousands of families from enjoying benefits 
that cannot be counted in money; and nearly 
all of them spend every summer, in needless 
if not foolish indulgences, ten times as much 
as their mosquito netting would cost. Pro- 
tection against flies and mosquitoes ought to 
be encouraged by law, and preached as a doc- 
trine of sanitary morals, and as a part of per- 
sonal religion. 

The protection of milk and drinking water 
from typhoid and other poisons is less a part 
of house sanitation than of general sanitary 
interest to the community, but it is of the 

12 



HOUSE HEALTH 

greatest possible importance. The purity of 
the water supply of lakes, rivers, and wells, 
and the protection of milk cans from wash- 
ings with contaminated water, have made a 
large chapter in all recent discussions of per- 
sonal and public hygiene. Their importance 
can hardly be overestimated, but in general 
the poor rarely have the means of protecting 
themselves from these dangers, except by boil- 
ing their water and their milk before drinking 
them. An immense gain would be made if 
all the people could know that these dangers 
often exist, and that they can be avoided by 
so simple a means — only the milk should not 
be boiled, but heated to 170 ° R, for the boil- 
ing point changes its taste and lessens its di- 
gestibility. Lately it has been discovered that 
a little metallic copper immersed in drinking 
water for a few hours destroys all the typhoid 
germs it may contain, without injury to the 
potability of the water. So here is a possible 
easy means of protection from typhoid poison. 
But it has its drawbacks, one of which is that, 
as it is so easy a remedy, it is likely to be for- 
gotten at the very time it is most needed. An- 
other objection to it is that dependence upon 
it is likely to lead to a relaxation in the gen- 
eral watchfulness over the water supply itself. 
Typhoid-fever germs are believed to be oc- 
13 



HOUSE HEALTH 

casionally brought into the house on lettuce 
leaves, strawberries, and other vegetables that 
have grown on or in the ground. These 
things are usually eaten uncooked, and so may 
be dangerous. Sewer water used to fertilize 
the plants is almost the sole source of these 
germs. Perfect protection against them can 
be secured by washing the edibles with a five- 
per-cent solution of tartaric acid — a harmless 
substance that enters into our common cook- 
ery. The solution is made by adding a heap- 
ing teaspoonful of the acid to a pint of water. 
After thorough washing of the foods in the 
solution, or their immersion in it for five min- 
utes, it is easily rinsed off completely with 
pure water, leaving not a particle of its sour 
taste, nor changing the taste of the foods. 
Even a little of the sour taste is not objection- 
able; tartaric acid is quite as harmless to the 
system as vinegar. 

The health of the people would be vastly 
improved by certain reforms in eating and 
drinking, but such reforms, like all reforms 
in our daily habits, are difficult of accomplish- 
ment. 

Much of our food is poorly prepared by 

cooking and otherwise, whereby we get too 

little nutriment out of it a and with such effort 

on the part of the digestive organs as to im- 

H 



HOUSE HEALTH 

pair their powers, as well as the powers of 
life. Meat should be cooked with two definite 
objects in view: to kill parasites in its sub- 
stance (as of trichina and tapeworm), and 
to render it easy to comminute by chewing; 
seasoning will always render it palatable. But 
we often overcook our meats, even burn them, 
and render them tough and indigestible. The 
most nutritious meat is often the toughest 
and cheapest, like round steak. Such ought 
to form a large part of the meat diet of the 
poor, but it should be minced artificially. One 
of the most profitable implements in any house 
is a grinding machine for meat. It costs 
little, and its saving to the family, in a house- 
hold where it is used to the best advantage, 
is every year many hundred per centum of 
its cost. It obviates the need of much chew- 
ing of meat ; it prevents indigestion, and gives 
to the body the largest amount of the meat 
pabulum that is possible. It is substantially 
true that meat for all children should be finely 
ground for them, for children as a rule chew i 
their meat very little more than the carniv- 
orous animals do; they swallow it in chunks 
which are poorly digested, and this is un- 
profitable as well as unhealthful. 

Many families waste their soup bones, and 
deprive themselves thus of one of the most 
15 



HOUSE HEALTH 

nutritious and digestible foods and one that 
is easily prepared. They fry ham and make 
it indigestible, when it could be made both 
palatable and digestible by boiling. They fry 
or boil their eggs hard, when they can be 
curdled more easily and made perfectly di- 
gestible. They eat fresh bread and hot bis- 
cuits to the harm of their stomachs and the 
waste of their substance, when stale bread 
has a better taste and is a perfect food. They 
laudably try to get good milk and then take 
pains to prevent it from souring, with the idea 
that souring spoils it for use as human food 
—they even feed it to the pigs because it is 
sour. But the best people of our own South 
have long since demonstrated that sour milk, 
otherwise clabber, is one of the best of foods, 
as well as one of the most palatable of them 
all. This conclusion has been confirmed by 
modern medical science. 

The betterment of the food and a reduction 
in the use of stimulants by the people is a 
perennial subject for argument and exhorta- 
tion. Progress is slow, if, indeed, there is 
progress, which there probably is; and plain 
and rational living, which means scientific liv- 
ing, must be advocated in season and out of 
season for the better health and greater hap- 
piness of the race. This advocacy is good 
16 



HOUSE HEALTH 

for the people who make it, and of some help 
to those for whom it is made. But the de- 
mand for these reforms is insignificant by 
comparison with the need of more fresh air 
in the houses, especially the little houses with 
cramped rooms and mean quarters. 

Other improvements that are greatly 
needed in the dwellings of the poor are : high- 
er ceilings and more cubic feet of space for 
each occupant; more sunlight through more 
and better windows; improvements in chim- 
neys, fireplaces, and stoves, so that there will 
be less carbonic oxide and other products of 
combustion for the inmates to breathe ; fewer 
candles, lamps, and gas jets for light, and 
more incandescent electric lamps, to lessen the 
contamination of the house air; and finally 
more cheerful interiors and exteriors of dwell- 
ings. These considerations are important; 
but they lose nine-tenths of their urgency in 
the presence of good ventilation, and good 
ventilation is many times more vital and health- 
giving than all of them together. Fresh air 
is so universally absent in every house where 
it can, by any prejudice or fear, be shut out, 
that it stands to-day as the one paramount 
want in dwellings and places of assembly. 
With it, the stoves will draw better, the rooms 
will be found large enough and the ceilings 
17 



HOUSE HEALTH 

will be high enough, and the homes will have 
the best ornamentation of all: namely, better 
health and more vigor, fewer colds and more 
cheerfulness on the part of the occupants. It 
will be of less consequence whether the floor 
is above the earth or whether it is the earth. 

There is a widespread intense fear among 
our people, rich and poor alike, of some pos- 
sible baneful effect of fresh air, of good ven- 
tilation and draughts, and especially of the 
cleanest and purest air of all; namely, the 
night air. With many of them this fear is 
more absorbing and abiding than their dread 
of sin and death, or of the great hereafter. 
This fear has been handed down from gen- 
eration to generation like a truth that is sacred 
— but it is not a truth and it is not sacred ; it 
is a very vile and death-breeding prejudice 
that can be swept away only by constant argu- 
ments, example, and insistence. 

Of the other needs I have named, sunlight 
is the only one that ventilation cannot wholly 
substitute. Sunlight is health-giving and 
ought to enter every dwelling, but its chief 
value is in its power to destroy pathogenic 
microbes, and if the microbes are absent by 
exclusion of insects, the suppression of dust, 
the absence of sickness, and by good ventila- 
tion, then the sunlight is not vital, save for 
18 



HOUSE HEALTH 

its effect on those who rarely or never go out 
of doors ; and even to them it is incomparably 
less important than fresh air. Where there 
are coughing tuberculous patients, of course 
sunlight is in the highest degree desirable, 
for it has power to destroy the germs of the 
disease ; and this is one of its greatest values 
in inclosures of all sorts; that is, to guard 
against tuberculosis in the house. But the av- 
erage room in good houses can have sunshine 
only a short time any day ; hardly long enough 
to kill accumulating tubercle bacilli ; the great- 
est benefits of daylight and sunlight are and 
must always be experienced out of doors. 

Thus the gospel of the best health and the 
least sickness is outdoor air and the daylight 
and sunlight of out of doors. In proportion 
as our houses bring these blessings within 
them are we well and wholesomely housed; 
in so far as they are shut out are we poorly 
housed. Our theory is wrong which holds 
that man is fortunate in proportion as he is 
able to cover himself with a tightly built house. 
The truth is that almost in proportion as he 
gets back to nature in the open, or, if you 
please, back somewhat toward barbarism, does 
he have the best health and the longest life. 

When a rich man leaves his mansion and 
builds himself a shack in the wilderness that 
19 



HOUSE HEALTH 

he may have for a brief period the greatest 
of earth's benefits, it is called luxury; but 
when a poor man must live in a shack because 
he can have no other or supposedly better 
house, it is called hardship ; and we are flooded 
with pathetic laments against the fate that 
compels innocent people, even children, to live 
in houses through whose cracks the winds of 
winter whistle and sprinkle snow on the beds 
of the sleepers. 

As long as such heresies last the reforming 
philanthropist has work ahead of him. He 
may well devote his energy to a campaign of 
education against this sort of foolishness. 
And he may remember for his soul's comfort 
that few greater services are ever done for 
any man than to show him that some of the 
things which he regards as his misfortunes are 
really his blessings. 



20 



Human Talk 



Human Talk 



Man is the animal that talks, and a large 
part of such education as he has is devoted 
to the cultivation of his speech and the uses 
of it. Sometimes the whole of his education 
is of this sort. The literature of the talk of 
man is varied and enormous, and is the ac- 
cumulation of ages. It would seem as if every 
side of the subject must have been studied 
and threshed over to the last analysis. But 
this is not the case and cannot be. Evolution 
of the language goes on with that of the race ; 
and evolution will not stop even though we try 
to make it. There always is, therefore, and 
probably always will be, a new word to be 
uttered upon this absorbing subject. 

Much attention has been given to the art 
of conversation and to the graces of elegant 
speech, as well as to the value of a large vo- 
cabulary. Races, peoples, and individuals us- 

23 



HUMAN TALK 

ing the largest number of words and the most 
varied forms of speech have had, other things 
being equal, most power in the world. This 
is rational, for words are among our working 
tools, and those who have most words, other- 
wise the largest capacity for communication 
of ideas, are likely to be best equipped in the 
struggles of life. Great power to phrase ideas 
helps to the creation of them, and leads to 
thought, and so gives the inside track in the 
world race. But this fact is only incidental 
to the art called conversation, and for this 
latter a large vocabulary is not necessary; 
with the bare knowledge of a hundred words 
some people can converse beautifully; nor 
does the size of the vocabulary account for the 
revelations that a man unconsciously makes 
about himself when he talks. And many of 
these revelations are worth studying, for they 
are marvelous. 

There is, among people in general, a vast 
amount of ignorance about their speech in 
many of its phases. For example, we know 
very little about the physical production of 
speech; most of us are ignorant of the way 
sounds are produced and syllables made by 
the human voice, how the different organs of 
speech, the lips, teeth, tongue, palate, and vo- 
cal cords operate, and how their actions are 
24 



HUMAN TALK 

coordinated. Few among even thoughtful 
people ever think of this side of the subject, 
not to say study it. In childhood we learn 
to talk mimetically, we never know how or 
why; and on reaching years of maturity we 
mostly continue in the same ignorance. 
Asked offhand to state the difference in the 
vocal creation — the mechanism of production 
— of the sounds of the letters m and n, or of p, 
d, or b, or of the syllables ko and go, and not 
one educated man in twenty, if indeed one 
in a hundred, could tell readily and correctly. 
The coordination of many phonetic sounds 
into some thousands of combinations required 
for correct speech in any language constitutes 
a maze of physical and nervous mechanism 
that is altogether beyond the grasp of most of 
us. Few students ever attempt to grasp it; 
and to some of them the fact that the vocal 
tones are all made by the vibration of two thin 
strings in the larynx comes as a piece of sur- 
prising information. 

Nothing better illustrates our abounding 
ignorance of this side of the subject than our 
toleration of certain impediments of speech. 
Perhaps the commonest one, and surely the 
most discreditable one, is lisping. This dis- 
figures the talk of many people through life, 
and is usually, and mistakenly, thought to be 
25 



HUMAN TALK 

due to some defect in the vocal organs. Ask 
a hundred educated men and women as you 
meet them, how to correct lisping, and not 
two will tell you — while most of them will 
declare that it cannot be done. Some phy- 
sicians and voice teachers there are who do 
not know any better; a few of these are them- 
selves lifelong lispers. But the worst lisper 
can learn in a few minutes to speak correctly 
if he will observe even casually how he makes 
his own sibilant sounds with the tongue and 
upper teeth, and how normal speakers use the 
two sets of front teeth without the tongue. 
Lisping is a hissing outrage upon the lan- 
guage, a despicably unnecessary blemish of 
speech; and most of the other so-called im- 
pediments are just as needless to normal 
mouths, if not quite so easily correctible. 

Ignorant as we are of the way we vocally 
form our words, we as poorly comprehend the 
methods and motives underlying the subject- 
matter of much of the talk of mankind. This 
latter is the psychologic side and is gen- 
erally supposed to be simple and easily under- 
stood, but it is complicated beyond expression. 
Talk is said to reveal the man; it does, but 
often as much by what it omits as by what 
it utters, and even by the very contraries of 
the latter. 

26 



HUMAN TALK 

Many of the mental aspects of man as a 
talking animal have been dealt with in fiction 
— indeed, large novels by some of the masters 
have been almost wholly devoted to the talk 
of the people of their plots, with plentiful dis- 
cussion of the psychologic phases, and these 
have helped us to a somewhat better under- 
standing of the motives that influence many 
of us in the commoner walks of life. But 
the novelists have created little; they have 
transcribed much, and varied a little what they 
have heard people say. As men are incapable 
of creations of fancy that are not somehow 
constructed out of the materials of experience, 
the fiction writers must mostly fill their stories 
with people and situations and plots out of 
the experiences of life, rearranged, of course, 
by the skill of the writer, as children re- 
arrange their blocks or picture cards to 
make new structures and effects. Often the 
result is grotesque as well as fanciful, as it 
is meant to be to stir or shock the popular 
fancy, or as it must be when it is the product 
of an abnormal brain ; and many of the fiction 
writers have abnormal minds. Sometimes the 
writers seem moved by a larger purpose, to 
give the deeper springs of speech and action 
— really to educate — but usually, as most nov- 
elists themselves confess, they write to amuse 
27 



HUMAN TALK 

their readers and to sell their books. These 
writings, moreover, are nearly all woven about 
the paramount sentiment between the sexes, 
and so, while for this reason they are usually 
interesting and frequently fascinating, they 
have a narrow range when the whole of hu- 
man life is considered. 

Much of the most revealing talk of people 
could never be written in a story — some of it 
would be thought improper and might exclude 
the books from the mails, or, for the most 
needy of its readers it would be uninteresting. 
Although the novelist is frequently gifted to a 
high degree with insight, he often fails to 
catch all the meaning of the talk he hears, all 
its impelling motives ; and I am sure thousands 
of people never themselves know or would be 
able to define the deeper promptings of much 
of their own talk. Few people have a power 
of introspection that is sufficiently searching 
to do this ; as few are calm enough, and hon- 
est enough with themselves, to do it. When 
one attempts to interpret the ultimate motives 
of his own talk he is apt to be swayed by one 
of two emotions: either his egoism, which 
gives a wrong tilt to his judgment ; or his self- 
abasement, due to essential modesty or a sense 
of his shortcomings or his sins. It is a doc- 
trine both venerable and true, that nobody can 
28 



HUMAN TALK 

if he would tell the complete story of his life, 
and that nobody would do it if he could. 

Very much of the interesting conversation 
among people fails to reveal either to the cas- 
ual observer or to the thoughtful student the 
whole picture of the motives that lie back of 
it. In the twilight yonder, for example, there 
is the hum of low-pitched, intense conversa- 
tion between a young man and a young wom- 
an. They are trying, or appear to be trying, 
to have a heart-to-heart talk, which means a 
completely frank talk with each other; but 
they seem to find obstacles, the sledding is 
hard, the runners grate upon the gravel. They 
are wholly unfrank, and they talk in riddles, 
hints, and inferences, and with gentle shafts 
of satire, irony, and appealings. What is all 
this fencing about? The common verdict 
would be that two youngsters are trying to 
make love to each other, and really are afraid 
to do it, but such a verdict would be wrong. 
Possibly, even probably, the man is too bashful 
to come to the point readily and say just what 
he would like to say. Most likely he is cov- 
ertly trying to learn how the woman would 
treat a serious proposal if he should make one 
to her ; the deep motive — undefined and dimly 
perceived — is to avoid the possible humiliation 
of a refusal. At the same time he appears not 
29 



HUMAN TALK 

to know that she is trying to shun a cognate 
calamity. He thinks she is uncandid or cruel, 
and she judges him similarly. Both judg- 
ments are wrong as to the cruelty, for each 
is embarrassed by difficulties that are uncon- 
sidered by the other. To be absolutely un- 
reserved she would have to say to him : " I 
suspect that you would like to know how I 
would answer if you were to propose marriage 
to me. This in justice to myself I cannot tell 
you, and if I were to do so my attraction for 
you would cease." For her to be thus candid 
would stamp her as simple-minded. So she 
must angle to bring him to the point of mak- 
ing a proposal — if he is so inclined — without 
having consciously given him beforehand any 
very plain hint of how she would treat it. She 
would not for a small world give him, or her 
jealous friends and enemies, the chance to say 
that she had given her answer to a momentous 
question that had never been asked — and he 
dreads above all things to be refused by a 
woman. His cowardice is far less commend- 
able than hers, for his sentimental fate is less 
dependent upon the issue. 

Such are some of the emotions that are 

quite as moving in the confab as the tenderer 

sentiments, and almost as unavoidable, and 

they are at bottom a sort of conceit, an egoism, 

30 



HUMAN TALK 

a selfishness that shrinks in an uncourageous 
way from the chance of a humiliation. It is 
an emotion that is apt to make one uncandid 
and unf rank, and appear to be less noble, with- 
out really being so. But this guidepost of the 
conversation rarely or never comes out in a 
story, although the story may be enchanting, 
and may give much of the iridescence of the 
talk correctly. 

The thing that appears to the unintentional 
observer of the case referred to, is two young 
people who are making love in what seems to 
be a very bungling way, and whom their 
friends would like to help along, or stop, or 
smother. Not only do we usually fail to see 
the egoistic quality of the talk in this kind of 
a conference, but the two parties themselves 
are equally oblivious to the fact that it has 
such a quality. People in general do not know 
when they themselves talk or act conceitedly. 
They dislike to reveal an excess of egotism, 
or any egotism at all, and usually do not know 
that they show it, or even that they have it. 
But when this weakness possesses them it in- 
variably crops out in their talk sooner or later, 
and if they discover it they try to reform, al- 
though the effort may be weak and halting. 

So in a thousand ways, by their conversa- 
tion, people disclose motives that they are not 
31 



HUMAN TALK 

even aware of having; sometimes the fact is 
perfectly obvious, sometimes very obscure. At 
times they show plainly certain motives they 
know of and think they hide, at other times 
they do nearly hide them. If we study people 
thus as from a height, impersonally, and try 
to see how their talk is related to their inner 
selves we shall make some surprising discov- 
eries. 

People by their accents, modes of expres- 
sion, pronunciations, and idioms, reveal their 
degree of education, their associations, their 
habits, and the land of their birth. And they 
are rarely able to hide these things from good 
observers. A Scotch friend of mine had lived 
in America for thirty years and had never 
been able to get rid of all of his brogue. He 
divulged his origin in nearly every sentence 
he uttered. Lately he made a visit to his old 
home and tried by all his arts, by broadening 
his brogue and the local character of his 
clothes, to pass himself off as a Scotchman, 
but he failed utterly. He was everywhere 
branded as an American. The idioms and ac- 
cents he had not been quite able to get rid of 
had stamped him here as a foreigner, while 
the talk methods he had acquired here, and 
thought he knew of and could hide while 
there, betrayed him unerringly. 
32 



HUMAN TALK 

If we could hear all the talk of any set of 
people, a discriminating study might discover 
a large part of the personality of a given mem- 
ber of it. He might reveal nine tenths of him- 
self, directly or indirectly. The final tenth he 
probably could not reveal if he would, and he 
most certainly would not if he could. But we 
should need to hear every word in order to 
learn the nine tenths. And of very few peo- 
ple would it be possible to do this, while as to 
these few we should probably be so biased as 
to spoil the best judgment. 

The obvious motives or emotions that most 
enter into the talk of mankind are three or 
four in number; there are a myriad of minor 
ones, like the wavelets of the sea, but these 
few stand out as the most cardinal of all. One 
is a desire to please — that is, to make a good 
impression; another is self -entertainment. 
Another is to accomplish the business or mis- 
sion in hand without special regard to the 
impression made upon others, that is, to get 
information and to do things. A third is a 
certain, usually unconscious, sentiment of 
protest, an irritability that prompts some ob- 
jection to every proposition. In this all shades 
are shown from gentle disapproval to snarling 
opposition. The mental and moral porcupine 
quills are turned forward, and every approach- 
33 



HUMAN TALK 

ing object plunges against them with more or 
less force and surprise. 

The same individual will often show each 
of three or four emotions to be uppermost at 
different times within an hour, sometimes 
within the space of a minute. These few emo- 
tions, with other and minor ones, are com- 
mingled in such variations at different times 
in the lives of people as to make the picture 
of a moral kaleidoscope; no two are ever 
quite alike. These pictures reveal themselves 
in the talk as well as the actions of people, and, 
I believe, always best and most accurately to 
the thoughtful outside observer, rarely as well 
to the men and women in the picture. 

The emotion of a desire to please and the 
emotion of protest run in opposing directions. 
Both are more or less selfish, but this end is 
attained in different ways : by the former we 
gratify ourselves through our consideration 
for others, and it is always acceptable to 
others; by the latter we draw ourselves into 
our selfish shells, and please ourselves while 
we antagonize others. 

The logical purposes of speech are useful- 
ness and pleasure. It is to enable us to ex- 
press our feelings, desires, and intentions ac- 
curately ; yet it so often, even among the most 
refined, fails of this and tells something dif- 
34 



HUMAN TALK 

ferent that one is sometimes tempted to doubt 
its usefulness. Take a sensitive, refined wom- 
an with strong imagination and, if her ego- 
ism is also strong, it will be impossible to talk 
to her and be understood at just what you 
say. Ask her the simplest question and she 
will immediately guess that there is some pur- 
pose back of it that does not appear in the 
terms in which it is expressed, and she will 
direct her answer to that something, not to 
the question. Ask her how many hours she 
sleeps in the twenty-four, and she will say 
she goes to bed at nine o'clock. Ask her what 
time she gets up in the morning and she will 
not answer you directly, but, if she is young, 
she may tell you that she does have her les- 
sons ready in time; if she is a matron, she 
may declare that she does not neglect her 
morning duties to her children. Not seldom 
do these undirected, automatic mental changes 
hit the mark and divine the meaning that may 
be back of the questions, but most often they 
are far wide of the mark — ridiculously far 
from it; and, right or wrong, they are made 
with the speed of lightning. 

I once listened with great interest to a 
woman's account of the way she managed her 
children, asking, in the course of the conver- 
sation, a few commonplace questions about it, 

35 



HUMAN TALK 

and I was on the point of paying a high 
compliment to her good sense in the matter, 
when she broke out with : " Oh, I know you 
think I am densely ignorant and don't know 
how to bring up my children, and perhaps I 
don't ! " What was the matter with the wom- 
an? She merely yearned for approval and 
required it in every word and even look of 
her listener; without this she was sad and 
thought herself disapproved of. A meditative 
look from her listener would not do ; she must 
have constant manifest approval. 

Among such people conversation is often 
not so much a means of giving out one's 
thoughts frankly, as of each trying to divine 
what the other thinks and does not say; and 
each hiding somewhat of his own thoughts — 
a sort of psychologic game or gamble. And 
six times out of ten their judgments of each 
other are faulty as to the meanings that are 
hidden. People in gambling for money are 
said to try to cover their own emotions and 
divine those of their opponents — that is a 
psychologic game too. And in that game, as 
in the games of talk among sensitive souls, the 
mistakes in divination are at least as numer- 
ous as the successes. Invite a refined and po- 
lite friend to go to lunch with you, and ask 
what you shall order for him to eat. Will 

36 



HUMAN TALK 

he tell you truthfully ? Once in ten times per- 
haps, the other nine times he will name the 
thing he divines that you like, or he will have 
scruples as to the cost of his choice. He may 
retort with a question as to what you like, and 
if you say tripe he is almost sure to think you 
have named that delicacy because you think 
he prefers it. So he says beefsteak, which he 
guesses you really prefer. But he is himself 
fond of tripe, and so are you ; and in this blun- 
dering of politeness neither of you gets his 
first choice ; both are defrauded. 

A man will, almost in the lapse of a minute, 
order his employees in a matter-of-fact sort of 
way as to some piece of work, will scold his 
wife or child for some act or word that hap- 
pens to run counter to his raw sensibilities, and 
will then turn to some approaching neighbor 
or stranger and address him in the most polite 
and genial terms—making the best possible 
impression. Could you truly judge of that 
man by hearing a single one of these speeches 
without the others — and others still? Each 
shows him as quite a different being from 
either of the others. If he ever falls into an 
unselfish mood of introspection in a quiet mo- 
ment, the man himself knows he is a different 
being at each of these respective moments. 
When he stops to think — as he rarely does — 
37 



HUMAN TALK 

just what his moral impulses are in each of 
his moods, he knows. If you were to ask him 
why he was so polite to his neighbor, he could 
perhaps give you the correct answer, but it is 
doubtful that he would. And he might in his 
own soul, when mellowed by remorse, cor- 
rectly call himself a snappish brute for scold- 
ing his wife. 

But the girl who comes to call on you and 
talks for a full hour in a steady gale about her 
" things," and her notions, and what she and 
her mother and father said, and what the other 
girls said, and a hundred other things, and all 
without giving you a chance to wedge in a 
word — she could not tell why she does it, even 
if she prayed in sackcloth for the wisdom to 
do so. Should she be told that she had done 
all the talking she would be surprised; and 
should you tell her that the reason she did it 
was a mixture of bashfulness and conceit, with 
a disposition to be polite, she would be even 
more surprised. Yet you would be telling her 
a very exact piece of truth. 

The girl who talks in an interminable mono- 
logue does not always do it because she wishes 
to, but because, if she stops, she blushes with 
diffidence and is covered with chagrin. The 
talk is a trick to cover her bashfulness. Like 
many a young man making a speech, she 

38 



HUMAN TALK 

has difficulty to find a good place to stop. 
There is a vast difference between that girl 
and the one who just enjoys talking, and runs 
on, pleased with her own chatter. Her motive 
power is the purest egoism to be found in the 
list of human emotions. She will not get nerv- 
ous prostration from entertaining her guests. 
She will do nine tenths of the talking, and 
afterwards comment on the remarkable en- 
tertaining power of the guests. Visitors to 
her are a real boon, for they enable her to 
work off some of her pent-up potentiality of 
talk ; and this exercise is a constant joy. The 
woman who breaks down under such a strain 
is she to whom it is a duty, and a hard one, 
to entertain, or to keep up conversation. She 
racks her brain to think of things to say — the 
other one has so much to say that she has to 
restrain herself constantly. And when she 
does stop, it is with vast reservoirs of talk 
force still waiting to be tapped. 

The mental sense of a necessity to talk is an 
awful burden to some men and women. The 
presence of people whom it seems necessary to 
entertain becomes distracting. One feels that 
he must for their benefit keep up a running 
polite conversation, and the incubus of that 
feeling to a sensitive person is unutterable. If 
some other person will lead, or will carry 
39 



HUMAN TALK 

along the conversation, it is all right, as 
when you are the guest and the other the 
host. But you become the host and he the 
guest, and see the load grow heavy. Many a 
woman of society has gone down to helpless 
invalidism, to insanity, and to death under it. 
It is so awful to many nervous patients that 
they are forbidden to receive calls from others, 
especially from those toward whom they feel 
the necessity of being agreeable. One call will 
make such an one sick for a week. 

Few things can be more terrible than to be 
shut up with one whom you must entertain, 
or feel that you must, by conversation that 
shall not flag. For a calm, tranquil nature it 
is worse than solitary confinement; and for 
some of the nervous and sensitive ones it is 
moral and mental annihilation. 

In my presence once a girl was trying to 
satisfy her parents that she was justified in re- 
fusing to marry the man whom they had 
chosen for her. I did not think her arguments 
were very good, until she said that whenever 
he called upon her she grew tired trying to 
find talk to entertain him. Then I knew she 
had more than a reason — although it did not 
satisfy her father and mother. She had never 
learned the golden power of silence, and she 
was much in need of that lesson. Silence is 
40 



HUMAN TALK 

often the best conversation; and it is the 
greatest test and sign of the adaptation of 
friends to each other. Friends are never in 
the depths of each other's intimacy till they can 
be silent together and find that restful. Till 
then they are never divinely acquainted. 

Another person whose talk is often unfor- 
tunate is he who is prone to fear that he has 
said the wrong thing. He is likely to be a 
very literalist in his absurd casuistry. He will 
upbraid himself for something he has said or 
thinks he has, then go back and apologize for 
it, often to the surprise of the one he has 
talked to, who has seen nothing wrong in what 
he said, or possibly has seen a wholly dif- 
ferent wrong from the one the sensitive soul 
has worried about. The fellow who really 
speaks recklessly or improperly is usually the 
one who never discovers it, and even denies it ; 
and he is the last to apologize for it. 

The moods of conversation are a perfect 
aurora borealis of changes and curiosities. 
People seem at times to be dominated by a 
particular spirit or emotion that tinges every- 
thing they say. At times a whole company 
will seem to be in the grasp of this sort of an 
influence. It may be one of complaint, or of 
anger, of severity or hilarity, of religiousness, 
or of mirth. 

4i 



HUMAN TALK 

One of the most interesting is the joking 
mood ; you may often see a company of people 
swayed for an hour by this spirit. Everyone 
seems bound to contribute to the roystering. 
A serious word or suggestion is frowned 
upon ; nothing but jokes, gags, jibes, and take- 
offs are tolerated. Not even refined humor 
or wit will do; it must be loud or coarse; 
finally it becomes a sort of spiritual debauch, 
from which later there is a recoil in the semi- 
disgust of satiety, such as follows alcoholic 
intoxication or an outburst of mob violence. 

This spirit sometimes takes the form of 
practical jokes, even indignities, as in the haz- 
ing and initiations of students, and the chari- 
vari and kindred humiliations visited upon 
wedding couples. These things are often done 
by real if rather coarse-grained friends of the 
victims; they are unable to resist the force 
of the class conscience in the matter; one 
starts the ball of fun and hilarity, and the 
others must help it along. Each is moved to 
try to outdo all the others in devising the most 
striking and extreme infliction. So it is with 
talk of this sort — one tells a joke, another 
tries to match it, and feels annoyed or dis- 
appointed if he fails, and especially if he fails 
to evoke a roar of laughter. Conversation 
is stilted, the company speaks in riddles and 
42 



HUMAN TALK 

hyperbole. After the thing is over the par- 
ticipants often feel a sense of disappointment, 
and have a bad taste in their mouths. 

Another and quite opposite mood is one of 
such seriousness as to shut out all sense of 
humor. A joke causes surprise, not laughter, 
and a touch of really delicate humor goes un- 
noticed. In such a company, if you happen to 
indulge in a gentle bit of raillery, you are made 
to feel at once as if you had acted indecorously 
at a funeral. 

An interesting phase is what may be called 
the bored mood — shown in some specimens 
of the American sophomore, and in an occa- 
sional young person who has traveled and seen 
much of the world. The color of the talk is of 
disapproval and fatigue; as much as to say, 
" Why will you tire me with such common- 
ness ? " Or the attitude may be one of con- 
descension, as if to say, " You poor thing — 
you don't know any better." 

Another mood is that exhibited by the 
American college boy in the use of slang. His 
swagger, awkward way of walking, with his 
hands in his trousers pockets, lifting up his 
sack coat, and his pipe in his mouth, are a part 
of the same fashion. But the talk that goes 
with it all is perhaps most interesting, for 
some of it is not found in the dictionary. It 
43 



HUMAN TALK 

is decorated with peculiar slang, as, when the 
young man wishes to indicate that he must 
go to his supper he doesn't say that. He re- 
marks merely, " I've got to go and feed my 
face." And he has dozens of such slang 
phrases at his command, which he uses freely 
to cover a sort of bashfulness, or to show that 
he is a real fellow. 

An interesting fact is that each generation 
of boys has a different set of slang words and 
shibboleths from every other — not a set that 
is completely different, but one differing 
enough to show the evolution of the catalogue 
of slang, which to some degree means the evo- 
lution of the language, for many of our classi- 
cal words began life as slang. Nor are these 
peculiarities confined to the boys, for the girls 
of the period, especially among clubs and 
sororities of girls, develop slang that is quite 
as picturesque as that of the boys, if a little 
less harsh and grating. 

Changes of fashion in words and phrases 
are sought and followed as eagerly as we fol- 
low the fashion in hats and gowns. The old 
schoolmasters seek to keep the language as it 
was, but that is impossible ; you might as well 
try to stop the tides of the sea; and the new 
fashions in words and phrases are often the 
creation of the youngest generation, who are 
44 



HUMAN TALK 

in the age of easy experiment, and their in- 
ventions are at first all slang; later they are 
accorded, usually reluctantly, admittance to 
the dictionary. 

The bashful mood is the commonest one of 
all. The poor victim hunts for the right word 
and nearly always gets the wrong one, and 
blushes in humiliation whichever one he 
chooses. He cannot, in the presence of people 
he is not intimate with, divest his mind of 
thought about himself, and of whether he is 
saying or doing the proper thing. If he tries 
to converse with you he is constantly thinking 
of himself, in a sort of gentle egoism tinged 
with a sadness that his dull mind interprets to 
him as self-abnegation. He is one of the 
most pathetic victims of unperceived conceit 
in all the world. 

For some of these faults of talk there must 
be a remedy. Until that Utopian and improb- 
able day when men shall see themselves and 
each other as they really are, we cannot ex- 
pect that all such defects can be discovered 
and understood. But diffident people ought 
not to be forced almost to perish because of 
their hardships of speech; nor is it necessary 
that those with greater gifts should sink under 
the burdens of the conventional demands of 
45 



HUMAN TALK 

talk. The woes of both these classes are 
largely imaginary or self-imposed and there- 
fore in some degree correctible. 

The common sympathy goes out naturally 
to those who cannot talk, or who can talk 
little; but I feel sure that the other class, 
those who have great powers, but great bur- 
dens of conversation, are entitled to our more 
helpful sympathy. These are the victims of 
that unwelcome complex of symptoms badly 
named nervous prostration. They are always 
worse by having to entertain others much, to 
be polite to them, to find conversation and 
make talk. Some of them get faint, have 
headache and hysteria, sometimes even tem- 
porary blindness from these burdens. They 
fear the ordeal of meeting people; they shun 
them, and will cross to the opposite side of the 
street to avoid the necessity of greeting them ; 
they worry and suffer in the strain of their 
nerves from the visits and interviews they 
have had, and live in trembling dread of others 
yet to come. They grow irascible; they flare 
up or melt into tears at the merest trifles, and 
then grieve at their weaknesses, and are cha- 
grined at their faults. 

These people are among the more refined 
and highly civilized of the race, and this fact 
of itself should entitle them to sympathy. A 

4 6 



HUMAN TALK 

large proportion of them are women. Their 
high refinement is a misfortune. They really 
need to get back toward primal nature for 
their comfort and ease of living ; but since that 
is impossible, they must bear their ills with 
what help they can get. A great deal of their 
trouble is wholly needless, and a sensible 
woman may, by thought and self-control, 
avoid nine tenths of it. But the thought and 
self-control — that is the difficulty; not one 
woman in ten is equal to it, even if she knows 
the need. She can attain this end only by first 
knowing what her defect is, and then by com- 
pelling herself to do certain definite things to 
overcome it. This requires a large stock of 
courage and self-command in a person who 
is usually short of the average measure of 
these gifts. The real first trouble is her own in- 
tense sense of mental pressure; of a duty to 
entertain ; a fear that she will be socially criti- 
cised for being inattentive or for saying the 
wrong or inapt thing, or for being ungracious. 
The reason of all this is largely her own lack 
of tranquillity, courage, and poise; for these 
qualities are indispensable to success. If she 
had, or could create for herself, a quiet spirit 
of imperturbability, all her troubles would 
vanish at once. If she had ever learned the 
charm and power of silence she would not 
47 



HUMAN TALK 

have this or any other sort of nervous exhaus- 
tion; it would be impossible. That her fears 
about herself in these particulars are at bottom 
rather cowardly than otherwise does not help 
matters — only when she knows that cowardice 
is an essential part of the disease, that moment 
she has some, if a small, increment of strength 
to overcome it. 

The thing for her to try to do is to let the 
other woman — for example, the caller — do 
most of the talking ; to have a quiet chat with 
her, not on stilts or from a pedestal, but down 
on the plain earth, and about common, proper, 
simple things; and then to end the conversa- 
tion with pleasure that the friend has called, 
and herself be free from the usual undercur- 
rent of mental discomfort and symptoms of 
collapse. 

In order to do this she needs to make for 
herself a few rules of conduct that she must 
obey to the death. If she is a very nervous 
person she should make an oath to herself that 
she will follow these rules, if it is the last act 
of her life. If she needs the rules she must 
herself make them, and then stick to them. 
Such a code she might roughly formulate as 
follows : First, I will be natural and simple, 
not stilted and false, and pretending to knowl- 
edge or arts that are beyond me. Second, I 

4 8 



HUMAN TALK 

will not hurry in my talk ; I will pause and be 
tranquil, and not keep my mental fists doubled 
up in doing it. I will learn to be silent and 
not let this make me unhappy. Third, I will 
deliberately use my art of hinting and quizzing 
to set my guest to talking, while I listen. 
Fourth, I will be amused and entertained at 
my own efforts in thus managing my caller 
and myself; and I will steel my soul against 
any after-suggestion that I have failed or been 
maladroit, as I do against the temptations of 
the devil. 

Anybody who goes to work on these lines 
with enough courage will surely find his re- 
ward. He can succeed by his own efforts and 
alone if he will. But in all difficult tasks we 
are helped by union in effort, as we are always 
helped toward any goal (and especially if the 
goal has a social or esthetic quality) by the 
fact that others are traveling in the same di- 
rection. What is needed, therefore, is a move- 
ment in numbers, a fashion, a cult, toward the 
end sought. A society or club having this for 
its object would help greatly, if its numbers 
could be large enough to create a fashion. 
And if the needy ones only knew what they 
could gain by it they would hasten to band 
themselves together for this purpose. The 
name of the organization might be " The 
49 



HUMAN TALK 

Silence Club," or " A society for the develop- 
ment of the art of entertaining with a mini- 
mum of talk," or, better still, " The Abo- 
rigines Club," because it would cultivate a 
stoicism in silence like that of the American 
aborigines. The American Indian not only 
entertains others — if he does entertain them — 
in almost complete silence, but he seems not 
to be embarrassed by the fact that he is silent. 
He ridicules white people for talking so much, 
as he does for using so many words in their 
songs. The Indian songs consist of a few usu- 
ally plaintive monosyllables — nothing more; 
and for essential musicalness, they have, for 
this reason, a distinct advantage over our poly- 
verbal efforts. How profitably some of us 
might covet a little of this gift of the Indians ! 
When you come to think of it, the talking 
bouts of many of our social gatherings are, 
from numerous points of view, absurd. If you 
do not think so, then some day hide yourself 
where you can be a silent witness to one of 
them. Listen for an hour, and see if you do 
not think that, with half the words and more 
time for thought, even an occasional moment 
of total silence, there would have been a gain. 
Yet the capacity to take part and help create 
such a talking bee is an ambition of a large 
number of people. It is a pity only when it is 
50 



HUMAN TALK 

done at great friction of soul and wear and 
tear of nerves. Another misfortune is that it 
tends to fix the habit that is already too preva- 
lent, of talking first and thinking afterward. 

The recovery from this particular talk dis- 
ease, as already indicated, depends much on 
the ability of the victim to evoke conversation 
by others, while he has pleasure in holding his 
tongue and keeping his own powers in re- 
serve. And that ability is nothing but the art 
of making conversation easy. This art is a 
natural gift to many people, and is the envy 
of almost every bashful, diffident and self- 
conscious person in or out of enlightened so- 
ciety, To acquire it, to become adept at it, 
may well be the ambition of all the victims of 
this unfortunate malady. 

Nor is the art difficult or hard to learn. 
Anybody can have it if he has sufficient 
fortitude and self-control, and will persist in 
patience. But he must first be born again 
to a few cardinal truths that are always 
wholesome. To encourage conversation is to 
bring out and enlarge the powers of the 
other person, and these cardinal truths con- 
cern his interest and fate most intimately. 
When we consider the good of the other per- 
son, we, by so much, sink our own selfishness 
and conceit — and that, besides being good in 
51 



HUMAN TALK 

itself, is the true key to the art of conversation. 
To think of the other person and his needs is 
an act of genuine altruism, and leads us not 
merely away from our own selfishness, but 
away from our bashfulness (which is a phase 
of selfishness), so that our powers of rational 
talk increase. This kind of an effort is thus 
a means of grace ; and it brings us surprising 
rewards. It is a missionary movement whose 
value nobody will ever question. It helps 
those who receive, and it transfigures those 
who give. 

When one sets out in this sort of self-im- 
provement there are a few things he will do, 
and certain things he will very positively not 
do — and wherein he will be differentiated 
from the average man. In developing a better 
art of conversation he will not air his own 
things, his people, his gifts, or himself, save in 
the most tentative way, and to bring out the 
other person. He will hold in abeyance the 
subjects he knows most of, or speak of them 
with apologetic hesitation, and seek the ones 
the other person is most familiar with. He 
will ask gentle questions in a spirit of con- 
fidential deference so as not to frighten his 
friend, for questions asked in a conceited or 
pushing way are sure to scare the other one 
dumb. If he enters into real controversy the 
52 



HUMAN TALK 

conversation may stop suddenly ; but the gen- 
tle raillery of sham controversy may help it 
on. Too intense an interest in the subject of 
the talk may frighten the other person, as it 
will make him hesitate to change the topic 
when he is tempted to do so. Quizzing, jok- 
ing, or ridiculing another often stops his con- 
versation like water on a flame. 

Our artist in talk will maintain a demure 
mood of interested, rather ignorant inquiry, 
not critical or protesting, but sympathetic and 
indulgent. He will not in this go to the op- 
posite extreme of trying to make the other per- 
son do all the talking, or allow him to feel 
that his talk is taken critically, for that would 
soon shut him up like a clam. He will change 
the subject of conversation as needed, so as to 
prevent mental fatigue, and save the talk from 
running dry. He will not decorate his part of 
the conversation with silly giggles. He will 
learn just how much to keep silent, how much 
to inquire, how much to tell of what he knows, 
how much to defer, in order to put the other 
one completely at his ease and let him find his 
tongue. He will be able to rise to large things 
and to descend to small and simple ones with 
equal ease and facility, as the knowledge, ig- 
norance, and temper of the other person seem 
to require. Thus he will become a skilled per- 
53 



HUMAN TALK 

former in an art that is greater than any of 
the so-called fine arts, because it helps in a 
larger way the two classes of people who are 
most in need of its benefits, those who can talk 
and ought to listen, and those who would lis- 
ten and ought to talk. 

While he does these things he is submerg- 
ing his own conceits and egoism, forgetting 
his own bashfulness, and coming to be himself 
at ease. Thereby he makes a distinct growth 
in versatility for himself ; he broadens his own 
horizon and makes his attainments worthy of 
his own pride. Better than all else, he ac- 
quires a mood of mind and a serenity of spirit 
that will contribute powerfully to his own per- 
manent comfort and force. At the same time 
the other person learns to talk almost with- 
out knowing it, and warms with joy at his own 
expanding powers. Soon, too, he discovers 
that even his rude grasp of this new art gives 
him fresh vantage for higher attainments. He 
has found the key to other arts beyond. 



54 



The Blind Side of the Average 
Parent 



The Blind Side of the Average 
Parent 



Parents naturally think they best under- 
stand their own young children, but usually 
they do not. Most of them would probably re- 
gard such a doubt as a great deal worse than 
absurd. The contention that they who are the 
daily companions of their children do not and 
cannot read them truly, that childless people 
understand them better, would probably strike 
the mind of the average parent as a piece of 
harmless sophistry. Yet this blindness is so 
real that the demonstration stares every care- 
ful observer full in the face. Even a cursory 
study of the daily lives of a lot of small children 
shows that some of the strongest emotions 
which influence conduct are wholly unper- 
ceived by their parents, although the emotions 
are perfectly apparent and easily seen by 
the most casual observation. And the chil- 
57 



THE BLIND SIDE 

dren and the parents reveal the situation about 
equally, and quite unconsciously. These emo- 
tions not only govern the actions for the hour 
and the day, but, persisting and growing for a 
long time, as they are apt to do, they order 
and govern the whole course of the lives of 
such children, sometimes probably to their 
benefit, but often to their harm. 

The peculiar conduct of the children re- 
ferred to is neither hidden nor mysterious; 
everybody about them knows of it. But it is 
usually ascribed to mental impulses wholly 
different from the true ones ; the real basis of 
it is as foreign to the minds of ninety-nine per 
cent of the children's care-takers and parents 
as are the problems of calculus. Yet the com- 
plete proof is as plain as the earth we walk 
upon, and could not be hidden by any amount 
of effort, and never is hidden ; only the parent, 
and usually the nurse, refuses or fails to see it. 

Parents know a great many things about 
their children, and know these things inti- 
mately and often in minute detail. They 
know, for example, that a child likes certain 
amusements and particular things to eat and 
drink ; also that he neither likes to go to bed 
nor to get up early. A mother can usually tell 
you why her small child asks for a drink of 
water — it is thirsty. She knows that if it asks 

58 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

for a piece of bread and butter it is probably- 
hungry; and she may feel equally certain of 
this if it is pie the child asks for, although per- 
haps the motive is, in this case, nine tenths a 
desire for a sweet taste and one tenth hunger. 
Her knowledge of motives is fairly accurate 
when her boy asks to go and play with other 
boys, and she knows that she knows why. 

But when the boy has spent an hour with 
her in friendship and mutual entertainment, 
in even loving comradery as the pleasantest 
and most tractable of children, and then some 
visitors appear and the boy becomes a changed 
being, and begins to hammer her fine furni- 
ture, and interrupt the conversation to ask her 
a dozen questions which she had answered ten 
minutes before, then she is either uncertain 
that she knows why, or she attributes the 
change to some wayward tendency which she 
is glad to have the comfort of thinking be- 
longs to all boys. She never guesses the true 
motive, which is an egoistic greed for atten- 
tion to himself, a conceited jealousy of atten- 
tion to others. When she is talking interest- 
edly to a caller and the boy pulls at her gown 
to ask her to do some needless thing for him, 
and when he throws his blocks and papers on 
the floor, and then declines to pick them up 
at her request or command (after having 
59 



THE BLIND SIDE 

promptly and repeatedly picked them up with- 
out a protest while alone with her), then she 
thinks it is original sin, or that it is a punish- 
ment visited upon her for some unconscious 
sin or omission of her own. Not once in a 
thousand cases does such a mother divine the 
real cause of the mischief, and apply any ade- 
quate remedy for it — and the real cause is 
plain beyond question; it is clear to the sim- 
plest observation, and proven by the memory 
of every man who reflects candidly upon his 
own childhood. 

It is a doctrine of a modern cult in the care 
of children that curiosity and a thirst for 
knowledge on their part are laudable impulses, 
and to be encouraged. It is a good doctrine. 
A man looks back to his boyhood and recalls 
that then he was often rebuffed by his elders 
when he asked questions from a desire to 
learn; so he makes the generous resolve that 
his child shall never be treated thus, and he 
develops the habit of answering, as well as his 
knowledge permits, every question his young- 
sters ask. He sees them grow in knowl- 
edge of people and things, and he is happy; 
moreover he is a little proud of having helped 
his children in this way. But he has become 
such a slave to his own habit, that it has ac- 
quired the quality of obedience; and so his 
60 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

boy, not very far beyond babyhood, learns 
readily that, although his requests of his father 
for general indulgences are often refused, if 
his desires are put in the form of questions 
apparently asked for the sake of knowledge, 
he is promptly obeyed. Yes, obeyed is the 
word. The same questions will be answered 
for the fortieth time within an hour, as though 
the child had suddenly become mentally dull 
and had forgotten the other thirty-nine times ; 
then the father, from sheer fatigue at the 
monotony, is ready to obey the child in other 
things — to get him toys, and do things to 
amuse him, to tell stories or sing songs or do 
any sort of an absurd thing that will satisfy 
his offspring. 

It is only a short step from this experience 
of the child to the discovery that his parents 
dread to make a scene by efforts at his dis- 
cipline in the sight and hearing of strangers 
and persons outside of the family. So he plans 
to gain some point in the presence of company 
and usually succeeds. He feels a sense of su- 
periority in his knowledge of this cowardice 
of his elders, and he works it to the utmost. 
Thus he becomes an autocrat. His parents 
are under a degree of slavery to him that is as 
perfectly marked out and defined as any other 
fact in nature. They may be severe with him 
61 



THE BLIND SIDE 

in certain things ; for example, his moral con- 
duct, as they measure it, and especially certain 
phases of his social deportment; but in this 
particular field he is their complete master, and 
he knows it. They may chide him severely for 
his unkempt hair and dirty finger nails, and 
for not saying " please," but he has his way 
and his revenge upon them when strangers are 
near. And he maintains this mastery till he 
passes out of young childhood and often be- 
yond. 

A Philadelphia boy of perhaps eight years 
fell and suffered a cut in his forehead. He 
was taken by his father to the family doctor 
to have the wound dressed. The doctor told 
him that it would be necessary to suture the 
cut. The boy instantly began to cry vocifer- 
ously. His father commanded him to stop 
crying, and told him he was disturbing the 
neighborhood. The boy cried the louder ; his 
sire scolded the more insistently. Then the 
boy looked up and said : " What is there in it 
for me ? " The father replied : " Fifty cents " ; 
the boy said : " Make it a dollar " ; the father 
replied : " All right, a dollar. Now stop your 
noise." The boy then became quiet, and he 
endured the surgery without a murmur. He 
was so brave about it that he was allowed to 
go alone to the doctor the next day to have the 
62 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

wound redressed. Then the doctor gently ral- 
lied him on having got his father down to a 
commercial basis, when the boy said in re- 
sponse : " It was so easy that I'm sorry I didn't 
strike him for two dollars instead of one." 
This is a good illustrative example of the effi- 
cient discipline under which a boy may, even 
in his eighth year, bring his parent, when he 
has the right sort of skill, and enough of the 
thing familiarly called nerve. 

Now, the main impelling motive of the child 
in all this (and the type is a common one) is 
the love of attention and of being thought su- 
perior, smart, handsome, or wonderful; and 
there is of course, as a secondary motive, the 
desire to carry his personal point, whatever it 
is ; this means the love of power or the desire 
to outdo others — which is the main basis of 
the propensity for cruelty which most children 
have in some degree. The chief motive is to 
show off, to strut ; and it makes him do a hun- 
dred things in the presence of strangers that 
he would never think of when alone or with 
those intimate with him. Sometimes it leads 
him to queer, unusual, and even uncanny per- 
formances to attract attention; and these tac- 
tics he often carries on for years, and occa- 
sionally toward or quite into adult life. 

Once there was a little boy who was pale 

63 



THE BLIND SIDE 

and thin, and had a poor appetite. His con- 
dition aroused the interest and the solicitude 
of all his family and of some of his neighbors ; 
the boy was an object of wonder because he 
ate so little. How could he live on so little 
food ! A bird would eat as much as he ! This 
made the boy feel important ; he liked the at- 
tention; being the object of such interest 
tickled his conceit. So he continued his semi- 
starvation for many months. He did occa- 
sionally take food from the larder surrepti- 
tiously, but he was thin, shy, and a little queer, 
with few of the normal child activities, till his 
maturity put new life and vigor into him, and 
he evolved out of this particular foolishness. 
Later he confessed his part in the deception. 
In a moment of humiliation he told one of his 
confidants how he had kept up the deception 
till his wholesome hunger became more to him 
than his morbid pleasure. 

Such a case as this is not wonderful; it is 
not even uncommon in human experience. 
Only most people have supposed that such 
mental pathology is confined to hysterical 
women. The latter do sometimes practice this 
kind of deception for sympathy and attention, 
and for years continuously. But the egoistic 
emotionalism of children of both sexes also 
tends to this peculiar morbidness. In many 

6 4 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

cerebrally unstable children the tendency is so 
strong, the avidity for attention is so intense, 
that the slightest indulgence leads to a rapid 
growth of the moral deformity, unless — what 
is most unusual — it is counteracted by some 
friendly help in the opposite direction. 

I once knew of a young girl who for some 
years lived in three distinct and different moral 
existences. These phases appeared in various 
relations to each other, and she often showed 
two, and sometimes all three of them, in a 
single day. One of these personalities was the 
natural, sweet child, free from affectation, and 
normal in behavior, that she was capable of 
being. Another phase showed her as a preco- 
cious child with a religious bent, writing simple 
little essays which expressed deep contrition 
for her sins, but did not specify them. These 
writings were the wonder of her friends, who 
were also greatly troubled about her sins. The 
latter were very real, and she committed them 
in the third phase of her life. They consisted 
of a succession of petty thievings, mostly of 
candies and other sweetmeats. 

She always had with her in her exploits one 
or more of her younger playmates, with whom 
she divided the plunder, and they all enjoyed 
it together. This participation closed the 
mouths of her mates against telling, while they 
65 



THE BLIND SIDE 

wondered at her nerve, and regarded her 
abandon as evidence of a superior being. She 
gloried in their wonder, while they ate her 
stolen goods. Her parents and friends were 
proud of her precocity, and were touched by 
her contrition. So her vanity and love of at- 
tention were gratified, while she looked for 
fresh petting, and fresh trust after each esca- 
pade and repentance. When she was severely 
punished, as she was once or twice, the little 
manuscripts grew more religious and more 
self-lashing, which led to more melting on the 
part of her parents and friends. This latter 
fact pleased her and was fresh evidence of her 
power and of her dubious triumphs. 

This was an extreme case of egoistic mor- 
bidness, of love of personal enlargement, of 
self-importance, and of the most abandoned 
selfishness ; really it was in the borderland of 
degeneracy. But not a friend or parent of the 
child had the slightest grasp of the real emo- 
tions that were behind all this erratic conduct. 
Each one had some visionary theory by which 
he tried to explain it ; his theory perhaps satis- 
fied him, but it was no explanation, and only 
served to show his own credulity, and perhaps 
his forgetfulness of the experiences of his own 
childhood. 

Such parental credulity is, as a psychologic 
66 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

fact, as interesting as the egoistic perform- 
ances of the children ; and it harms the parents 
and children alike. It wrongs the parents be- 
cause it leads them to acts of omission and 
commission that are grossly unfair to the chil- 
dren. Every parent would like to do the best 
for his child, and so. to act as to insure to it 
the largest career of usefulness and joy. But 
his blindness leads him to foster and cultivate 
in the child a lot of the most harmful morbid 
impulses. Thereby he, the parent, misses one 
of the finest opportunities for doing good that 
ever comes to a human being. 

To the child these tendencies are demoral- 
izing in the extreme. His mental concentra- 
tion upon his own person and pleasures, and 
the growth of his egoistic life beget a state 
of emotional exaltation and nervous erethism 
that is fatal to any high degree of stability of 
his brain. The sanest and most satisfying 
happiness in life is forever denied him. 

Every such child is handicapped ; his career 
is blighted to a foregone certainty ; he is never 
as efficient or useful as otherwise he would be, 
or as he deserves to be; and he falls behind 
his fellows in all the best ambitions. 

From your lodging window you may per- 
chance look down on the back yard of a poor 
family, the chief playground of some children. 

6 7 



THE BLIND SIDE 

There you shall see a little boy playing with 
a few sticks and utensils that serve as toys. 
He " rides " a broomstick, and for the moment 
he is in fancy a horseman, maybe a mounted 
soldier. He has no store toys that cost money. 
His only companion, for the time, is his 
mother, working in the kitchen and speaking 
to him occasionally from the open door. Pres- 
ently he is thirsty and hungry, and he goes in 
and gets himself a drink of water, and his 
mother gives him a piece of bread blackened 
with molasses. Soon he goes out again and 
begins to play, but before long a feeling of 
drowsiness creeps over him, and he lays aside 
his playthings, lays himself down, and is 
soon fast in the arms of a quiet slumber. 
His mother puts a folded garment under his 
head for a pillow. In an hour he wakens 
refreshed and cheerful, and is ready for play 
again. 

Maybe your other window looks out upon 
the well-furnished back yard of a rich family. 
There too is a little boy at play. He has many 
toys, some expensive ones, and he is playing 
with them. There is a young woman with 
him. She is not his mother, but a child's nurse, 
whose ostensible business is to see that his 
needs are all provided for; that he is clothed 
and guarded from harm; but chiefly she sees, 
68 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

and is instructed to see, that he is entertained. 
She is his servant, although she thinks she is 
his mother's servant. She obeys him im- 
plicitly, save in a few cardinal things which 
his mother has forbidden. But his mother 
never forbids his being constantly amused by 
others at his command — the thing that tends 
to nervous destruction. The boy plays quietly 
for a while; then he is hungry and is fed. 
Next he begins some new game or play, and 
soon tires of it. Then he tells the girl to help 
him about another, and she obeys. Soon he 
tires of that; then he turns to another, then 
another and still another, and he tires of them 
all successively, and grows irritable with his 
fatigue. With each change he is more intense 
and nervous, and each successive change di- 
verts him for a shorter time. Finally, dissatis- 
fied with the plays which she has devised, he 
commands her to invent others, and she tries 
to, but none of her devices will do; then he 
demands a dozen impossible things, like horses 
and cars. She cannot provide them, and if she 
could he would not enjoy them for more than 
a moment, for he has reached the end of his 
resources of nervous energy. He is in a 
frenzy of superstimulation and hysteria, and 
cries with a mixture of grief and anger. Then 
the nurse takes him in her arms and walks 

69 



THE BLIND SIDE 

with him, tells him a story or hums a tune, 
till finally he stops crying, ceases to complain, 
and falls asleep. He is carried to a soft 
couch, but he talks in his sleep from bad 
dreams, and after a while wakens in a nervous 
and unhappy mood, with a bad memory of his 
latest pre-slumber experience. He wakens to 
go through the same damaging program 
again ; and this is oft repeated, with some vari- 
ations, through most of the years of the apron- 
string time of his life. 

And the mother seldom discovers that this 
constant entertainment by others, this ever- 
lasting stimulation at his demand, this contin- 
uous vaudeville, is harmful to the child. It 
has never entered her head that the perpetual 
pandering to a child's love of amusement may 
mean a weak manhood or chronic invalidism. 
I have known a mother to discharge a good, 
quiet, and responsible nurse girl, because she 
was unable to invent enough kinds of amuse- 
ment for her boy. The boy did not like her 
for that reason, and that was enough for the 
mother. She would have a nurse that the boy 
liked, if money could hire her, and of course 
he liked the one who would give him the larg- 
est measure of the play that pleased him ; and 
this play was the most thrilling and exciting 
that was possible. 

70 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

The one fortunate thing for that boy was 
the fact that in a few years he would grow 
and develop out of the nurse-girl period and 
into the saving association of other boys, even 
if it meant many violent adventures and many 
cuts and bruises. Better a thousand times 
that, better rough games with their dangers 
of deaths than a continuance in this intoxicat- 
ing life. 

Pleasure in some sort is the supreme yearn- 
ing of human nature. As a present experi- 
ence it is a hint of heaven; in anticipation it 
lightens the burdens of the day; and it may 
be a continuous if a lessening joy to look back 
upon. But pursued as a business it eventually 
disturbs brain stability and emotional balance. 
It makes for weakness in the severe function, 
unavoidable to most of us, called the struggle 
for existence. A child is full of imagination, 
and self-indulgence is his first law ; we should 
never shut our eyes to this fact. When left 
to himself he will, quite enough for his good, 
make pleasure to be his chief concern; it is 
when to his native impulses in this direction 
is superimposed by the connivance of others 
a systematic and long-continued stimulation 
of his fun-loving faculty, that his other powers 
are likely to shrivel. Then his joy becomes 
pathologic and unwholesome, his emotional 
71 



THE BLIND SIDE 

equilibrium is broken, and he is preparing for 
nervous collapse later in life. 

In all history there is hardly an example of 
a man great in the affairs of men, who grew 
up as an only child in his family. What can 
be the explanation of this fact? Certainly it 
is not poor hereditary influences or lack of 
the usual educational advantages in childhood 
or youth ; the only child usually has many in- 
dulgences denied to one of a numerous family. 
But often, if not usually, he has the blight of 
a child's overdeveloped emotionalism, and he 
lacks something of the strength-giving influ- 
ence that comes of a family life with other 
children. He is more apt than other children 
to live on the love and service he demands; 
he never grows by that which he gives; and 
he becomes progressively worse till a new 
birth of maturity opens his eyes. But by that 
time his nervous exaltation may have become 
a fixed cerebral state that in some degree lasts 
through life, and is a perpetual mortgage upon 
the promise of his success. It is a certain 
neglect, as well as the obligation to shfre, that 
saves; and the children of a more numerous 
family often have perforce some|hing of both 
these wholesome influences, and so a blessed 
salvation from ills that come to the less for- 
tunate. 

72 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

The only child is usually overemphasized 
in every way that blind and solicitous parents 
can devise. They provide for all the real 
wants that they think of, they protect him 
from danger, they guard him as far as they 
can against every obstacle, and make him as 
nearly useless as possible. They deprive him 
to some degree of the greatest mint of pleas- 
ure he can have, which is the equal compan- 
ionship of other children. Worse than this, 
they rob him of the benefits that always come 
from equal contests and struggles and inven- 
tions with others. Life with other children 
amounts to a manual training course. The 
child who can have this has a long lead of 
other children ; lacking it, the only child in the 
family suffers. His environment prevents him 
from knowing the real world till late in his 
childhood, because he fails to mix freely on 
equal terms with his normal real world, which 
is a world of childhood ; he is outdistanced by 
his fellows; he never quite catches up. He 
rarely or never enters early into the vigor- 
making^tussle of the world, to bear privations 
and learn to do things with few tools ; to bear 
and forbear, to share and to serve. 

His life tends to egoism and conceit, as he 
learns to manage and deceive his parents. 
Really inferior to the similar child of a nu- 
73 



THE BLIND SIDE 

merous family, he fancies himself superior be- 
cause he has more attention and indulgences, 
and is made more useless, and so he fails to 
improve as he might, and he grows more un- 
commendable. Usually able to command the 
attention of his elders and get their favors, it 
would be a miracle if he did not grow in con- 
ceit and self-emphasis. As a rule, when a child 
comes to live on equal terms with other chil- 
dren, he soon finds that there are no special 
favors for him; he must be truly democratic, 
and the notion that he is an aristocrat is 
promptly taken out of him, not seldom with 
a shock that he never forgets. His conceit is 
trampled on in cruel fashion, but always to his 
final and lasting benefit. Verily, the only child 
of a family is usually entitled to more pity and 
genuine charity than most of the gamins of the 
street. A few parents in a thousand are wise 
enough, thoughtful and courageous enough, 
with their " only child " to spare him the usual 
effects of such a calamity; and such parents 
are among the really great people of the 
world. 

The ministry of patience is divine. Happi- 
ness comes to us very much in proportion to 
the simplicity of our desires and the fewness 
of our wants. Growth and strength are the 
offspring of a certain degree of privation. It 
74 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

is demoralizing to a child to know that he can 
have most things that he desires; for so his 
desires expand and multiply, and become ex- 
acting and petty. Then he becomes an auto- 
crat without knowing it, and thereby makes 
himself step by step unfit to bear the pitiless 
shocks that are inevitable in the rivalries of 
life and the struggles for personal success. 

In proportion as a child becomes an auto- 
crat is his future harmed and the totality of 
his joy through life lessened. There is no ex- 
ception to this rule. In almost the exact pro- 
portion that he learns to serve and wait does 
he become strong for manhood and fitted for 
power and enjoyment. This truth is as con- 
stant as the stars. And most forceful children 
will early become autocrats if allowed to. 
They are powerless, by their own initiative, 
to prevent it. Nothing can save them but help 
from without, or the accidents of life, among 
which are poverty and the need of dividing 
their favors with other children. 

The marks of the autocrat in a child are un- 
mistakable. Note the positiveness with which 
he demands things when he is really aroused ; 
and note the surprise when he finds he cannot 
have them. It is not the surprise of a self- 
restrained child with the saving power of 
bashfulness just coming on to annoy and pro- 
75 



THE BLIND SIDE 

tect him ; it is the surprise of a caged and en- 
raged animal. 

A little girl once got herself wedged in be- 
tween two chairs and was for the moment un- 
able to extricate herself. She called out to her 
mother to come. The mother, seeing that the 
child was unharmed, came slowly. Then the 
youngster yelled viciously and in intense an- 
ger for her mother to hurry. It was a yell that 
would be impossible to any child not accus- 
tomed to be obeyed. It was not a cry of fear 
or despair or a piteous cry for help, but a spite- 
ful screech that told plainly how that child 
was wont to be obeyed by her mother. She 
would have shown more patience with a 
stranger or another child whom she might 
have asked to help her. 

Anyone who will take the trouble to study 
a hundred small children as to their crying 
spells will make some interesting discoveries. 
The spells may be classified as to their causa- 
tion. They are due to physical discomfort ; or 
to fright, to grief at deprivation, or disap- 
pointment of a sentimental and not physical 
sort; or to a sense of injured dignity. Chil- 
dren differ in their crying as in everything 
else ; some cry little, others much. Those who 
cry much have emotional natures that are 
more intense and unstable. Those who cry 

7 6 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

little are fortunate in good nerves or freedom 
from friction with their environment; or they 
are stoics. The child who cries much is either 
a great sufferer or has a temperament that is 
too emotional; and he who cries often from 
ruffled dignity has an unhealthy egoism with 
cowardice, and a poor promise for future sta- 
bility. This last frequently means, in this 
country at least, a very much indulged child. 
The little girl who fell between the chairs was 
furious, and cried from injured dignity, not 
from pain. In the absence of caste in this 
country little children are rarely taught a 
sense of dignity that they feel impelled to de- 
fend. But they acquire it by finding that they 
are obeyed. The love of power is as precious 
to a child as to a man ; it makes one jealous of 
its safety, and it grows by what it feeds upon, 
among rich and poor alike. 

A small boy was forbidden to go into a 
neighboring high-fenced yard and shut the 
gate. The gate was self-locking, and if it 
closed behind him, some one had to come from 
the house and let him out. It was a child's 
adventure for him to go into the yard and have 
his mother come after him ; and he tested his 
power by experimenting with her. He soon 
found that each time he called to her from be- 
hind the closed gate, she would loyally come 
77 



THE BLIND SIDE 

and liberate him — each time telling him that 
he must never do so again. One day when he 
called her she could not come, but sent her 
cook. Then he flared up, stamped his feet and 
screamed in fury because his mother had not 
come to him. His dignity was affronted, his 
demands had been neglected. 

No child would make such a scene on a first 
experience of this sort. The explosion came 
of a mental habit born of many hundreds of 
similar tests that proved to him that he could 
depend on his elders to jump to his call. His 
autocratic tendency and so his dignity — ready 
to be hurt — was a growth of many months. 

A precocious and much petted little girl 
lived for a time in the house of her uncle and 
aunt. She was fond of her aunt, who took 
care of her, and who always came to her in the 
night when she usually wakened and asked 
for a drink of water. So each night witnessed 
a little visit with her aunt and some petting. 
One night the aunt was sick and the uncle 
brought her the drink, but she refused to take 
it. " Auntie is sick," he said, " and cannot 
come, let me help you." " No, I won't. I 
want my auntie," she snapped out. And no 
amount of coaxing could induce her to relent 
and take the drink from his hand. The strug- 
gle continued long, and was finally compro- 

78 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

mised by her taking the drink from an older 
cousin, who had been called out of bed to serve 
her. 

This child was not thirsty, in the physio- 
logic sense, and did not need a drink ; had she 
really needed one she would probably have 
taken it when offered. She wakened and was 
lonesome and liked attention and service. The 
drink was incidental. Her temper was aroused 
by any variation from the attention she had 
expected. And here was a mature man at 
her bedside — in his nightgown — helplessly 
pleading with her, five years old, to let him 
serve her ; and she, vain of her power, and in 
heartless disregard of her aunt's sickness, dog- 
gedly holding him to her ultimatum. What 
a picture! Yet this case is not at all uncom- 
mon ; in some form or degree it is represented 
in the observations of every adult person who 
has taken even casual notice of the so-called 
fortunate children of our time. Is it any won- 
der that such tendencies in children lead to the 
nerve wrecking of after life ? 

A curiosity of this subject is the ease with 
which a mother forgets the affront her child 
puts upon her. She tells him to stop doing a 
certain forbidden thing. He says in a tone of 
protest, " no, I want to." The mother says, 
" I'll punish you if you do," and repeats it sev- 
79 



THE BLIND SIDE 

eral times over. He stops, waits a few min- 
utes, watching her to see if a real storm is 
brewing or if it is only an idle threat; then, 
when her back is turned, he cautiously re- 
sumes the forbidden mischief. The mother 
on discovering this may be chagrined and un- 
happy, but she forgets to punish him as she 
had promised, and she recovers her serenity 
and joy in about one minute after the child 
resumes an attitude of obedience and amity 
toward her. She would not and could not so 
easily condone an offense in her husband or 
a tradesman or a neighbor. It is not that she 
forgives mischief on the part of her child — 
that is easy and natural as well as laudable 
— but she forgets being foiled and degraded. 
It is unfair to the children to charge all 
their overconceit and bad behavior to their 
own morbid emotionalism. Their parents 
often unwittingly help them, for they are 
proud of the children's achievements, and ac- 
centuate the unwholesome conceits of the lat- 
ter. They help the children to show off, and 
seem to be proud of them for it. A child 
tends to strut and act pompously, as though he 
were better than his fellows and above com- 
mon clay; his parents enjoy it and frequently 
encourage it; it shadows distinction for their 
offspring, and so seems to exalt them. This 
80 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

is seldom done in a family of many children, 
but often in a family of one child, or where a 
child is far removed in age from its brothers 
and sisters ; otherwise the wings of his conceit 
would be mercilessly clipped by the other chil- 
dren. 

The ideals of a mother are often fated to 
cultivate a certain degree of effeminacy in her 
son by keeping his hair in long curls far into 
his boyhood, and by refusing to suffer them 
to be trimmed, even when the child in his 
shame begs for it. If the boy likes to be thus 
unfavorably conspicuous among his fellows, 
it is proof to a demonstration that he has be- 
gun to take on the girl quality of mind, or that 
he has acquired a most unwholesome order of 
conceit — from neither of which calamities will 
he ever wholly recover. Occasionally a boy 
with the masculine instinct stalwart within 
him rebels against his mother who would thus 
sacrifice his future on the altar of her lesser 
womanishness. There is small wonder that 
he rebels as a boy, and his fight is admirable. 
It is pathetic that it should in after life, as it 
occasionally does, lessen the respect he has for 
his mother. It is a psychologic curiosity, and 
a sad one, that a mother, in her desire to keep 
her son a baby, should insist that he be, as 
nearly as she can make him, a girl baby, and 
81 



THE BLIND SIDE 

so do the thing that in her soul she could 
never wish to do, namely, to humiliate him 
with his fellows, with whom he must train and 
struggle and contend, and to give every one 
of his fellows an advantage over him in his 
man's career. It is more strange than the 
childless woman's devotion to a pet animal. 
The strongest manhood and the greatest ca- 
reer never come of a boy taking an effeminate 
character of either sex for his hero; a boy's 
only safe model is a strong man of his own 
knowledge and observation, or one out of the 
history of the past. The hero of history is 
good ; but the live hero is the better and more 
inspiring. 

Some of the autocratic children are saved by 
being sent away from home to school with 
other children. There the yearning for atten- 
tion, the tendency to overconceit and selfish- 
ness, are taken out of them by their fellows, 
and they pass into a more normal mental 
mood. Many times these children are sent 
away by reason of the nervous necessities of 
their parents — the parents cannot endure them 
any longer. The nervous breakdown of a 
mother is often induced by a few years of in- 
cessant slavery to the wishes and unreal neces- 
sities of a child (as often a single child as 
a number of children), but, thanks to this bal- 
82 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

ance wheel of nature, when the mother goes 
to the wall the child is spared. As long as the 
child is at home its autocratic demands wear 
upon the mother, and with their mutual nerv- 
ousness both grow worse. The wise separa- 
tion of them (from a calamity to the mother, 
if it must be) leads to the improvement of 
both, rarely if ever to their complete resto- 
ration. 

The frequent quarreling among children in 
a family is vastly less harmful than the com- 
mon indulgence of an only child or a pam- 
pered one. For, while quarreling is bad, it 
tends to counteract some child emotions that 
are worse. And it cannot be denied that it 
makes for strength of a certain sort, if it does 
not encourage all the graces of human in- 
tercourse. 

What is the explanation of all this parental 
apathy? Several circumstances doubtless 
contribute to it. One of the most potent is 
parental love, what might be called the animal 
love, the intense blind attachment of a mother 
animal for her young, and the reluctance to 
believe in any ungenuineness on the part of 
the child. The absolute singleness and hon- 
esty with which some parents deal with their 
children blinds them to the doubleness of the 

83 



THE BLIND SIDE 

latter. They, being open as the sunlight, are 
unable to imagine a child taking advantage 
of them. Alas, that they should so forget 
their own childhood! They can understand 
the occasional naughtiness of a child and the 
carelessness in behavior and untidiness and 
lack of order of most children; these short- 
comings are plain; they show on the surface 
and worry the parents. It is the outward 
seeming of ladies and gentlemen that all par- 
ents would like their children to have, and so 
they are deaf and blind to those less obvious 
tendencies that may harm a child's future. 
No career of man or woman was ever seri- 
ously hurt by bad table manners in childhood, 
or by the fiction building expressed in the 
white lies told at this time of life ; while count- 
less thousands of child promises of noble ca- 
reers have been dashed by exaltation of the 
egoistic emotions in the earlier years. Worse 
than this, some of those thousands have suf- 
fered through life with weak nervous systems 
— to be the constant pity and the frequent de- 
spair of their friends and the desperation of 
their physicians. 

Most parents like to hug the gentle conceit 
that their children are imbued with constant 
love for them. They desire above all other 
things to have everything pleasant in the fam- 

8 4 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

ily; they dread severe scenes and situations. 
They would rather see the children smile than 
see them benefited. In their minds it is a 
misfortune for a child to cry or be sorry ; but 
a few occasional moments of regret, of grief 
and crying, may add to the child's strength 
and future happiness more than a year of 
smiles. 

Parents usually theorize and wrongly theo- 
rize that lack of order, the use of slang and 
vulgarity on the part of their children — even 
the smoking of cigarettes — are likely to con- 
tinue through life to their infinite harm. But 
all such peccadillos put together are not a 
tenth part as harmful to a child's future as the 
cultivation of the selfish emotions which most 
parents unwittingly permit, if they do not 
foster. 

Some parents are habitually dishonest in 
dealing with their children, and seem to ex- 
pect that the children will be honest and can- 
did with them. They must know they are not 
candid with the children, and they ought to 
know that this course would naturally breed 
similar conduct on their children's part — if 
inheritance did not make it inevitable. And 
a man who is willing to be dishonest with his 
child is not entitled to much sympathy if his 
child returns him in kind. 

85 



THE BLIND SIDE 

It seems almost impossible for most well- 
meaning parents to correct their children 
severely unless they are angry. When not 
angry, they indulge, condone, and wink at 
conduct which they have forbidden and prom- 
ised not to tolerate. But such conduct annoys 
them constantly and humiliates them often, 
and so it is difficult for them to recognize or 
think much about the tendencies that obtrude 
less — like those I have tried to picture. The 
tendencies here sketched show themselves less 
obviously, in most cases, and appear less to de- 
mand immediate attention ; so they are wholly 
neglected, or their correction is postponed and 
dreaded. When the tendencies are finally dis- 
covered and their importance appreciated, it 
is usually seen that their correction will re- 
quire for a long time almost constant attention 
on the part of parents, nurses, or teachers; 
that daily struggles with the child will be nec- 
essary for a long time, and a degree of candor 
and frankness that is most unusual between 
parents and children, if not between caretak- 
ers and children. It is small wonder that the 
vast majority shrink from such a missionary 
effort. 

Most parents are cowardly with their chil- 
dren in some things ; they shrink from telling 
them certain wholesome facts in their physi- 
86 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

cal lives. It is just about as hard to tell 
them certain things in their mental and moral 
lives, and parents who really see the necessity 
for the latter often hesitate and put off the 
doing of it till they come to pretend to them- 
selves that it is not necessary. The children 
do not know of these tendencies in themselves, 
and they must be insistently told of them if 
they are to know. Primarily, they are as ig- 
norant of them as they are of their developing 
physical lives, and the annunciation does not 
come to them by their later experiences or 
from other children, or from undesirable 
acquaintances as is so commonly the case 
with the knowledge of physical development. 
When they do learn of the emotional in- 
jury done to them in childhood it is usually 
in the reflective years of maturity, and long 
after the mischief to their nerves is beyond 
repair. 

The greatest obstacle of all to any better- 
ment of the conditions here set forth is the 
inability of parents to understand the psychol- 
ogy of their children ; which is very much like 
saying that the chief reason why the average 
parent cannot see is that he is blind. The par- 
ent, like people in general, rarely sees as a 
motive for an act or a line of conduct in an- 
other, an emotion which he cannot easilv im- 

87 



THE BLIND SIDE 

agine himself as possessing for the moment, 
or under like conditions. He cannot picture 
himself as moved by egoistic exaltation in the 
circumstances in which his child is placed. He 
cannot remember that he himself perhaps 
thirty years before was moved by such emo- 
tions in his daily doings. He was so moved 
then, as his child is now, but he did not know 
it then or afterward, and his child is ignorant 
of it now. What is more, he does not as a 
man know definitely when or how he shows 
the same sort of emotion at the present time ; 
somebody else may tell him — drive it into his 
head, if such a thing is possible, but he sub- 
stantially never discovers it himself. 

A hysterical woman disfigured beyond ex- 
pression by such emotions never knows at the 
time the nature of her affliction. If she some- 
time discovers it, by a degree of introspection 
that is both rare and noble, she usually sets 
herself about correcting it. It is the observ- 
ing and discriminating friend who most surely 
discovers this overpowering twist in the men- 
tal and moral nature of children. Adults oc- 
casionally see it in the children when it is 
pointed out to them, and then they readily 
look back on their own childhood and confess 
to themselves that they were dominated by 
such emotions then. This, then, is an affliction 
88 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

that the individual, whether child or man, 
rarely discovers himself, but must be helped 
out of, if help ever comes. The helper nat- 
urally at hand for the child is his parent, yet 
there is hardly a person in the world so little 
likely to help him in this particular as his 
father or mother. 

This affliction is like sin, into which people 
fall easily, unconsciously and insidiously; the 
sinner needs to be brought to a sense of his 
condition by another. Usually it is a shock 
to him to discover his iniquity; so it is here, 
the blighted one is covered with shame. 
Would a parent cover his own child with 
shame ? Yes, and he often does for some tem- 
porary and perhaps trifling breach of deport- 
ment ; but rarely for an emotion that stealthily 
guides his conduct wrong, least of all for one 
that is so hidden that not one parent in a hun- 
dred ever sees it — that most parents refuse 
to see. 

Some of the most glaring exhibitions by 
children of the emotions referred to — the strut, 
the showing off, the pomposity, the smartness, 
the impudence, even, are often regarded by 
their elders as cunning, as evidence of precoc- 
ity and the promise of a coming great man. 
Hence the parent, as well as the child, is proud 
of the conduct. Is it likely that a father will 

8 9 



THE BLIND SIDE 

chide his son for a thing he himself admires? 
Is he likely to deliberately blast a budding 
possible great inventor, or business magnate, 
or college professor, or president of the 
United States? 

Yet, it is cruel to say that a child may not 
be saved from the harm of egoistic emotions 
run wild. In order to be saved, if he is to be 
saved truly, he must be made to know his ten- 
dency early. The only way he can know it 
is for some one to tell him positively, kindly, 
and confidentially, and by acts as well as 
words, and by insistence long continued if 
need be. This is a very difficult task, and it 
takes courage. It is a rare woman who 
will say to her child, and say it firmly and 
without anger : " This thing you are doing is 
the result of your foolish conceit; you do it 
to show yourself off, to get attention to your- 
self, and for no other reason. You are per- 
haps unconscious of this fact, but you must try 
to understand it. You must stop thinking so 
much of yourself; and, to help you, I will 
cease helping you and let you help yourself. 
You must serve others more and you shall be 
served less." The average woman would find 
the telling of this to be a large tax on her 
courage; and to do it repeatedly and not to 
relax her rule as to the indulgence of the child 
90 



OF THE AVERAGE PARENT 

would take more strength of purpose than 
most parents have. 

Through the babyhood of her child the 
average mother has constantly petted and 
amused it, and has been herself comforted by 
this service. To her the child's crying was a 
thing to be stopped by any gratification what- 
ever ; she responded instantly with sympathetic 
attention to its grief and petulance ; she nightly 
walked the floor with it in her arms to put it 
to sleep; and she provided, as by instinct, 
everything possible for its entertainment. This 
habit, therefore, became fixed and firm, and 
she had as much joy in it as her child had, and 
possibly more. To expect that now, out of 
her wisdom and philosophy, she will com- 
pletely change her ways,, make her child go to 
sleep alone in a darkened room (crying if it 
will) ; that she will stop buying expensive toys, 
and compel the child to amuse itself or go 
unamused ; and that she will refuse absolutely 
to respond to its autocratic demands, is to ex- 
pect what is next to impossible. To hope that 
she will forego the surpassing mother- joy of 
amusing her child, and try to find comfort in 
seeing it amuse itself, and in the better hope 
and prospect for its future as a man or 
woman — to expect all this, is to look for a de- 
gree of sense and courage and wholly unselfish 
91 



THE AVERAGE PARENT 

love that is wonderful, heroic, and extremely 
rare. 

That so few people have this courage and 
see the need of using it in these ways, permits 
our homes and our infirmaries to be filled with 
adult nervous wrecks. And there seems to be 
proof enough that the number of victims of 
such invalidism is not growing less, but is 
actually increasing in this country to-day. 



92 



Some Commencement Ideals 



Some Commencement Ideals 



A Baccalaureate Address 

To receive a diploma that stands for four 
years of work and study is an epoch in the life 
of any man — it is a milestone in his journey. 
A man's career is marked off by several mile- 
stones of differing significance. Next after 
infancy comes that one that is shown by the 
beginning of memory; then later that of se- 
lecting his school or college and mapping out 
his plan for youth — for his man's career is 
rarely outlined with any certainty till after his 
graduation from school. Much more impor- 
tant to his future, to his sentimental after-life, 
is the milestone of his graduation from col- 
lege, if he is fortunate enough to be so gradu- 
ated. Around that event cluster the most 
precious memories, and through it and be- 
cause of it, often come many of the best 
and most helpful associations. Alas for those 
95 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

who have been deprived of such memories 
and associations ; who, whatever their achieve- 
ments, are doomed to the pathetic, life-long 
regret (or delusion) that they are " unedu- 
cated." 

The diploma of a professional school (espe- 
cially if from a university) is in some respects 
the most important milestone of all, for it 
opens the door to a practical career in a life 
work; it is the threshold to the great world's 
tussle, to its toil and sweat probably, and may- 
be to its rewards — rewards that are always 
sweetest if they come, and come only, with 
the toil. 

Now that you have your diplomas, having 
earned them in honor, one of the first and most 
natural questions is, what you are going to do 
with them. 

Probably no two of you have the same no- 
tion of the worth of the diploma or its mean- 
ing; and you will doubtless dispose of this 
more or less precious document in differing 
ways. One may frame it in heavy ornate 
molding, and hang it in his office in a good 
light, and contemplate its beauties; he may 
expand with pride as he looks upon it and 
as he sees others admire it. Another be- 
lieving that it is somehow needful to expose 
the diploma to public view, will frame it mod- 

9 6 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

estly and hang it in some shadow, perhaps 
behind the door, where the inquisitive or those 
who doubt his professional character may in- 
spect it. Still another will put the roll away 
in a drawer or on an upper shelf, to be shown 
only to the officers of the law when necessary 
for registration or proof. 

The diploma, the graduation, are a high wall 
that men scale with some difficulty, to enter a 
larger field which has some rewards for them 
if they work, with, unavoidably, some penal- 
ties and many tribulations. This first achieve- 
ment is to some men so remarkable that they 
linger about the wall, wonder at it and at 
themselves for having scaled it — and have 
widening joy and admiration in their wonder. 
To others the wall is forgotten or altogether 
ignored, after they have planted their heels 
solidly into its farther footstones, and plunged 
forward into the new work ahead of them. 

As differing and varied are the estimates of 
the meaning of this hour by those who are 
here to do honor to your decoration. To 
some who are sentimentally near to you, it 
is an hour of moist-eyed gladness for your re- 
ward, and for this evidence of your growth 
and achievement ; to others it is merely a cere- 
mony, a display, and, to all of them, you, the 
recipients of these diplomas, possess various 
97 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

shades of physical bearing, beauty, and plain- 
ness, and are respectively endowed with spe- 
cific virtues or vices which the interested ob- 
server has no doubt in the world he can 
divine from the shape and expression of 
your faces and the carriage of your bodies. 

Others look with more certain, and with 
solemn if unmournful eyes, through the doings 
and sayings of this occasion to the life and 
labor that are to come ; and they mentally spec- 
ulate as to the way, the spirit, and the outcome 
of it all. 

Of this latter class are the thoughtful veter- 
ans who have traveled some of the way them- 
selves. How you can avoid the snags over 
which they have stumbled ; what new obstacles 
are likely to arise in this later day, and what 
new word of courage and caution you need 
now ; what new talisman can be given for the 
future; these are questions that rush in upon 
the older men, who have acquired the perspec- 
tive that comes only with the marching years 
of the journey. 

The career of every man is made by several 
elements: among these are his opportunities, 
his powers, his equipment for his particular 
work, his continuity of purpose, the character 
of his personal industry, and the accidental 
occurrences of his life. It is determined quite 

98 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

as much by the plans and conception of his 
work and of himself with which he starts out ; 
and these plans and notions are his ideals. 
Probably the ideals of no two men are ever 
exactly alike, but everyone has his ideals of 
some sort and in some measure ; they are back 
of all the ambitions and aspirations of young 
life, and they grow fixed with age. They con- 
stitute a large part of the motive power of 
most men who achieve anything of worth. 

That a man's ideals are his making or his 
destruction is a very old truth, but it refers 
mostly to the cardinal virtues. The standards 
of honesty, truthfulness, uprightness, and per- 
sonal cleanness are the highest teaching of 
all time, and they are substantially the same 
throughout the ages. They are the indispen- 
sable ideals. To enlarge on them now would 
be to preach a sermon, and that is not the 
present purpose. 

I would rather discuss a few of the usually 
forgotten or unthought-of ideals, the recon- 
dite standards of work and life and conduct. 
For there are many such ideals, and they gov- 
ern the lives and order the careers of men in 
unexpected ways. They are varied in force, 
in character, and in degree, and they nearly 
always possess a man without his knowing it ; 
often without his friends' knowing it. Every 
99 . _ . 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

man is in the grasp of one or more of them 
most of the time. They are automatic and 
never stop ; and they often control a man like 
a fetish. They are hidden leaks that lose his 
power and initiative, or some undiscovered 
supply that increases them. A man may for- 
get for an hour his good resolves or his re- 
ligion, but these stealthy, idealistic guides will 
stick to him like his habit of breathing; they 
work with the certainty of the subconscious 
mind; they never sleep. 

These ideals create habits that control us 
inevitably; and we often go on for many 
years or through life completely ignorant both 
of the ideals and the habits they have created. 
They have fixed themselves upon us and made 
or marred our work, and we are blind to 
everything but the end results — and at these 
last we wonder ; and usually account for them 
in the wrong way. 

What are ideals for ? To make a righteous 
life? Yes; but to make a successful one as 
well ; to increase our power to do for ourselves 
and for others; to increase our capacity for 
the larger joys. Within the realm of sanity 
one does not have ideals whose purpose is mis- 
ery for himself, damage to his aims, or harm 
to his friends. But the ideal of enmity to the 
wicked and to the enemy still exists and is very 
ioo 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

old; it will probably never wholly die out of 
the human heart. 

The greatest success in life, on the average, 
comes to those with symmetrical powers and 
character; not to those who are warped and 
one-sided. So that ideal is of most worth 
which makes a man stronger in his weaker 
powers; that is most worthless that increases 
his unbalance and accentuates his warping. 
Wherefore, there are fit and unfit ideals. 

But the apparent paradox is that, apart 
from the greater virtues, the ideals a man usu- 
ally acquires, those which dominate him — 
what we may call his secular ideals — are unfit ; 
that is, they are such motives as increase his 
asymmetry rather than lessen it. 

The reason for this is not strange; our 
ideals in this sort come to us along lines of 
least resistance; we grow into those we have, 
rather than others, because it is easy to do so. 
The reverse ought to be the case; we need 
ideals that will help us over our defects, not 
to increase them. We are as far wrong many 
times in our educational methods. A boy se- 
lects as the thing to study that which he learns 
easiest and knows most about; and he neg- 
lects the tasks that for him happen to be 
harder. Such a course tends to enlarge the 
greater talent and to shrivel the lesser one. 

IOI 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

This large talent is often the sole substance 
of genius; in the greatest degree it amounts 
to degeneracy, and the world is not in such 
need of geniuses as to make an approach to 
degeneracy, or to the borderland of it, profit- 
able. Society could better do without the 
geniuses, now and always — it does not need 
them. 

The sometime gospel of pedagogy holds 
that the child, from the beginning, may select 
his course of study — learn what he likes and 
omit what he pleases. Of course he likes 
those things in which he is apt and strong, and 
hates those hard ones in which he is weak; 
and so he grows more uneven. Happily, all 
educators do not agree to this tenet ; some be- 
lieve that a child's course of study should tend 
to make a symmetrical man, and not favor 
one-sidedness. This is the part of wisdom. 

Thus of a man's ideals. They ought to con- 
tribute to his power and increase his happiness. 
But unfit ideals — both positive and negative — 
are the source of a great amount of grief and 
failure. That man who knows (from his ex- 
amination papers or otherwise) that his use 
of English is crude and blundering, should 
have the perfection of the language for one 
of his ideals ; he should try to acquire a crit- 
ical sense of it. But this is the very thing he 
102 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

is least likely to do, because his consciousness 
of his fault is dull, and the ideal is hard. The 
lack of such an ideal has kept many a man 
below his deserts, and sometimes has even 
blasted a career. I know of several notable 
examples of this kind. One was a man of 
great superiority in his profession, who failed 
of appointment to a professorship which he 
had coveted for years, and for no other reason 
than the lack of such an ideal. 

If a man could know that in his demeanor 
he is liable to be rude, brusque, and impolite 
(as his neighbors know it) he might erect an 
ideal of gentleness and courtesy with great 
profit to his spirit, and, if he practices a pro- 
fession, profit to his purse also. Probably he 
has already fully developed powers in other 
directions, most likely in force and effective- 
ness. Can he discover the need of a new ideal 
and create it ? Probably not ; for nothing but 
a new birth in introspective psychology can 
enable him to do it. And if he thus acquires 
an ambition for a new ideal, he must watch 
himself for long before he can create a new 
habit. 

On the other hand, the man who is naturally 

courteous and thoughtful of the feelings of 

others in little things, and especially in their 

entertainment, is in danger of overworking a 

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SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

good ideal. For it can be carried so far — and 
often is — as to entail a great burden in the 
duties which it seems to impose. It is a bur- 
den by the fear, even terror, it often produces 
in its possessor lest it has been or may be vio- 
lated. And when it is in excess it has no com- 
pensating advantages, except some very du- 
bious ones. The standard requires the person 
to be polite and to entertain others in conver- 
sation ; so a sick man wears himself out enter- 
taining thus a lot of people he is under no ob- 
ligations to. A distinguished friend of mine, 
when on his deathbed, and too weak to talk to 
anybody, actually felt called upon to apologize 
for not talking. The impression grows to be 
a sort of craze — not only to talk, but to believe 
it to be a duty to talk whenever within earshot 
of others. Then follows a species of deception 
and finesse — for we get tired of people, even 
our friends, and tired of talking to them; we 
shun them, keep out of their way, avoid them, 
give a lot of fictitious excuses for not com- 
ing, and for being out when they come to us. 
For we know perfectly that once in their 
presence nothing but syncope or death can 
stop the wagging of our tongues. That we 
have enough of plain personal courage to stop 
it is, in our civilization, unthinkable. 

Some ideals as to our dress, adornment, and 
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SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

personal demeanor are peculiar if not un- 
canny, and lead to many bypaths that take us 
into unexpected regions. Sometimes the effect 
is in itself grotesque, and very often it is po- 
tent in its influence on character and success 
in life. The sum total of these results is usu- 
ally unfortunate if not bad, the sole advantage 
being the happiness which the individual him- 
self seems to get out of his indulgences. It 
is a cheap sort of happiness, always discolored 
by a degree of vanity; but many of us seem 
to find substantial joy in such things. Once 
in the East there was a judge, who, for a quar- 
ter of a century, appeared daily with his hair 
in large long curls about his neck. It was 
inevitable that this should influence his char- 
acter and his relations with other people. The 
curls amounted to little in themselves, but they 
singled him out from among the rest of the 
community, and they were a large factor in his 
life through the self-complacency and egoism 
which they ministered to in the man. He 
could no more avoid thinking about his curls 
and their effect on others than he could stop 
winking. 

If it were the custom for men to wear rings 
in their noses, it would mean little that a par- 
ticular person did it, except a thraldom to a 
mere fashion — a thing we are all constantly 
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SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

victims of to some degree. Fashion allies us 
to a race, a guild or a set of people. But for 
one man in a hundred thousand to wear a ring 
in his nose takes him out of the fashion and 
into the realm of eccentricity and overconceit. 
There is virtue in the defiance of that kind 
of a fashion whose only real purpose is dis- 
play; but the judge failed of this. Such a re- 
volt would have required a fine sort of courage 
and independence. If that kind of fortitude 
had been required in order to wear the curls, 
he never would have had them. It needed only 
a species of vanity, a desire to do something 
others did not or could not do, something that 
would distinguish this man from all his fel- 
lows ; or an abounding desire to please his per- 
sonal fancy. Nor did he curl his hair from 
an idealistic desire merely to distinguish him- 
self from others. That could have been done 
through creditable work, art, achievement, 
daring, risk, or courage — which countless 
thousands of men and women are laudably 
doing every day. What the judge did took 
no courage worthy of the name, no work — 
save a few minutes each morning with his 
curling facilities and the help of some mem- 
ber of his family — no attainment or study or 
skill. He paraded his curls like the color of 
his skin, or the shape of his features, or the 
1 06 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

gait of his walk, and without a particle of 
credit to himself. 

Now, the curls were a trifle, like an inch- 
long finger nail, or a beard as long as the 
body of the wearer. These are little things in 
themselves and amount to nothing in the 
world's greater arithmetic. But they are 
meaningful if they signify a mental quality, an 
emotion, which colors the life and segregates 
in some way an individual from his fellows — 
and they always mean a weaker rather than a 
stronger character. They are more vital still 
if they beget, as they tend to, an emotional 
bent that lessens the power of the individual in 
the work at his hand. Such a waste of per- 
sonal force and influence is a sin of large pro- 
portions. And it is no adequate answer to 
this criticism to say that such habits, so acting, 
are happifying to the individual, for joy can 
come as truly from noble emotions as from 
weak ones, and no man has a right to pleasures 
that dwarf him. 

To make oneself odd by defying a useless 
or injurious fashion, when it takes courage to 
do it, is commendable. That is to defy the 
class conscience and take a stand for the sake 
of personal conscience. The fashion in trifles, 
like neckties and ribbons, is sometimes the 
refuge for souls that lack courage. To refuse 
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SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

to use tobacco or liquor, or wear high collars 
or tight corsets when they are in style, some- 
times takes the manner of courage that pushes 
a man into battle, or makes him face an epi- 
demic of deadly disease and refuse to run 
away from it. No case can be made out 
against such courage — it cannot even be 
laughed down. It is the attribute of the real 
and not the sham hero. 

There are some ideals which a professional 
man cannot afford to do without, as there are 
those which he ought to shun with all his 
might. 

One of the latter which is very common to us 
is that of our own sense of certainty and suf- 
ficiency. We fall into it unavoidably. We 
possess, we come to believe, the very founda- 
tions of all wisdom, and we are strong for re- 
forming the world, if not making it over, in 
the first decade of our professional lives. So 
there grows up within us a great amount of 
dignity and personal importance that are sure 
to be jarred by sundry experiences of life 
which are inevitable. But we feel bound to 
protect and defend them nevertheless. When 
a man seeks our professional advice and then 
fails to follow it, we sometimes feel affronted 
and are grieved over it, and so waste a store of 
good energy that we might put to a better use. 
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SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

It is a slow lesson for us to learn, that peo- 
ple have notions of their own — foolish ones 
often — which they have been following more 
or less for centuries, and that they have some 
rights to follow them even if they are foolish ; 
also, that they frequently will follow them in 
spite of any and all of our efforts to dissuade 
them. And we cumulate unhappiness for our- 
selves when we let our sense of professional 
dignity and personal importance run hard 
against them. It is a long step forward when 
the doctor, young or old, can say to his mis- 
behaving patient, and say it gently : " Of 
course you do not have to follow my advice. 
It is given to you on the theory of doing you 
good, but you can ignore it if you wish — only, 
remember, that if you do neglect it, not I but 
you take the responsibility. I am willing, 
even glad, to be freed from responsibility if 
you wish me to be." This sort of tactics not 
only shows that the doctor has learned to con- 
trol himself ; but it also is the most potent in- 
fluence to clear the moral atmosphere between 
himself and his client. 

Have an ideal that you will do your work 
honestly, faithfully, and as precisely as possi- 
ble, not lazily or carelessly, and that then you 
will take the consequences without whining. 
This is of the very essence of the best courage ; 
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SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

it was the ideal of the greatest soldier of re- 
cent times — and it saved his cause and him- 
self. Moreover, after you have planted your 
seed as best you may, not perhaps as well as 
another might, but as well as you can, then 
watch for its sprouting, but don't dig up the 
ground to see if it is beginning to sprout or 
is growing downward. 

Shun the vicious ideal of speculating in your 
mind as to what in general others think of you. 
Don't walk down the street mentally asking 
people whether they recognize in you the sort 
of fellow you think you are. They will never 
so recognize you anyway; and for you to do 
this distracts the mental attention and pre- 
vents serious work; it leads to worry, fear, 
suspicion, jealousy, and heartburnings. It 
never pays. And when with exalted emotions 
you begin to guess — for many will, and usu- 
ally guess wrong — as to how others think and 
feel about you, then you are walking along the 
rim of the grand canyon of gentle lunacy. 
You may never do it — pray God that you 
never will — but you can then very easily 
plunge over into the abyss. 

I once had a friend, eminent in his profes- 
sion, who, when called in an emergency to see 
a patient of another physician, always pre- 
scribed with ingenuous loyalty both to the pa- 
no 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

tient and his doctor. But he was sure to go 
round the next day and make an unexpected 
call on the patient. When asked why he did 
it, he said, after some hesitation : " I do it to 
see how I stand with the family." He was a 
good man in most things, but he was wrong 
in this, and this foolish ideal tinged with dis- 
credit his whole career. He had no call to 
constitute himself a detective to find out 
whether the people thought well or ill of him ; 
and it was little advantage if he did know, for 
if it was well his vanity grew, which was 
needless; and if it was ill he increased his 
bitterness, which was harmful as well as un- 
necessary. His duty ended when he had 
served the patient honestly and scientifically, 
and he ought to have had the courage to rest 
his case there. His duty was, like the duty 
of all men, to know himself that his conduct 
was intentionally correct and tallied with the 
golden rule. Then he needed manliness 
enough to walk erect and let others think what 
they might. 

One of the best ideals of all is that we will 
not and cannot afford to be petty and trifling. 
This is a hard one to hold to, so naturally do 
we fill our minds with the trivialities of life. 
We talk about trifles, hear about them by the 
hour, and read them in the columns of gossip 
in 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

about folks, in the daily papers. If you care 
for a curious study in the anatomy of your 
own daily life, just make a list every night for 
a week, of all the trifles that have concerned 
your mind during the respective days — and 
lay the record aside for a year. Then read 
it over carefully and say whether you think 
it was a profitable week. 

One of the hardest things of all to do — and 
one of the most important to be done — is to 
make sure that we do not regard to-day that- 
thing to be momentous which to-morrow we 
shall know was a trifle. The struggle after 
real consistency is a hard one ; and a fine sense 
of proportion is a rare gift. 

One of the greatest achievements of a 
young doctor is to be able to be dismissed by 
a patient and be serene about it. It is a ques- 
tion of point of view and the relation he thinks 
he holds to his patients. If he has the only 
right view, namely, that he is a servant of the 
public, and that his relations with his patients 
must be of absolute mutualness, and that he 
most of all desires that the relations shall 
cease the moment the mutualness is broken; 
if he can measure up to this platform he has 
smooth sailing; otherwise, he is sure to en- 
counter repeated seas of water both hot and 
cold, that will rob him of many of the joys of 

112 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

life that he is entitled to and very much 
needs. 

Numerous professional men go through life 
with such false notions about their fees as 
to create for themselves a lot of trouble. 
Their difficulties are chiefly of two kinds. 
One is an unreasoning idea, and wholly 
groundless, that all clients must be averse to 
paying for professional services, and resent 
being asked to pay. One who has this idea 
is likely to feel that sending a bill, and particu- 
larly the dunning of a debtor, has some of the 
qualities of a challenge to combat ; and at best 
he finds it a very unpleasant task. This is all 
wrong ; the average client expects to pay a fair 
fee for faithful services ; and to take the con- 
trary view discredits both the doctor and the 
public, Of course there are a few men and 
women who have no appreciation of their just 
obligations to anybody or anything, and al- 
ways try to shirk them — but they are the ex- 
ception, and we ought to be willing to teach 
them some lessons by wholesome insistence, 
and to do it without anger and without look- 
ing or acting as if we had been stealing. 

The opposite ideal with which a few start 
out is that of coveting the enormous fees that 
a few men have received. This attitude is un- 
fair to the public, who should only in the rarest 
113 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

instances be expected to pay such sums — and 
can only in a few cases afford to pay them — 
and it does the doctor discredit, begets a spirit 
of sordidness, and works against the best serv- 
ice of the profession to the public, which is one 
of the most sacred of all duties. 

Let us first be scientific and faithful to our 
patients; let us acquire friends and a large 
clientele if we can; then let us raise our fees 
to keep down a flood of work that happens to 
flow our way. When, if it ever comes, some- 
thing leads the public and the profession to 
make a large enough market for such talents 
as we have, then let our fee-bills to those able 
to pay recognize the fact; but let us never, 
as we hope for future happiness, be grasping 
with the poor people, who give the world its 
best lessons in frugality and honesty; and let 
us, as we hate meanness, never forget our own 
beginning days of small things. 

Let us be honest to science and to ourselves. 
If we have to shade the fact to the patient for 
his good, and even to give him placebos to the 
same end, we must never deceive either sci- 
ence or ourselves. There is only one right 
way to study and practice medicine, and that is 
in a spirit of humility to the truth, and espe- 
cially to a new truth — but a truth proven. For 
the new truths come and will continue to come, 
114 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

and with a conservative skepticism we must 
keep our minds open to receive them. 

Probably the most effective mental quality 
that most young practitioners lack — that few 
men have at the beginning — is a sufficient 
gift of imperturbability. No other quality so 
makes a man, especially a doctor, superior to 
accidents, emergencies, and trouble as this 
one; as no other is so profitable in making 
him a power in the profession and in the 
world. 

If a patient dies on the operating table, or 
goes out in a minute from pulmonary hem- 
orrhage, or if you discover you have blun- 
dered, you must not shake ; and you must not 
throw up your hands while life lasts. How- 
ever appalling the emergency may be, you must 
not be discouraged, and you must make your 
best fight when the tide sets against you. In 
athletic games that man is worth little who can 
only play his best when victory and the shouts 
of his friends are in the air. So in this pro- 
fessional life, and in all life's struggles, that 
man who is strong only when no calamity 
threatens counts for little ; he is nearly worth- 
less, and may be worse than that. In this ci- 
vilian career the best qualities of a good sol- 
dier are needed, namely, dependableness in 
trouble. 

115 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

Finally, there are a few ideals that are so 
vital for an all-round success that they have 
the quality of sacredness. One is that this 
business of life is too important for us to waste 
time and energy in personal contentions. If 
we contend it must be for some principle or 
for a benefit to the public whose servants we 
are. There is one sovereign remedy for all 
personal quarrels that anybody may try to get 
you into — that is to ignore them and go on 
with your work. If you will only have pleas- 
ure in this and let it fill your days, you will 
have no time to contend, and your neighbors 
will soon discover this and be made better 
by it. 

Another ideal, and the most sacred of them 
all, is one of wholesome discontent — a discon- 
tent that must only end with your latest breath 
of mentally competent life. You must be dis- 
satisfied with the many unsolved questions in 
science, problems of the greatest interest, prob- 
lems that concern the lives of the people. It 
is an unending work of love and interest to 
solve them ; and the long night of our past ig- 
norance about them must not discourage you. 
So much new science has come by the labors 
of our profession within the memory of men 
still young, that nobody should be discouraged 
as to the future. Every man must have an 
116 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

interest in discovery. If you may not become 
an investigator you can help hold up the 
arms of another who is, and so have some part 
in the cumulative glory. Stirred by this dis- 
content your eyes must look steadily forward 
for new light — beware of the false light — for 
the true one will appear and you shall not be 
surprised, because you have been looking for 
it all the years. 

So shall you grow and learn to your latest 
day, and you shall escape the calamity of 
mental fossilization. This deplorable fate of 
so many men comes of a fixed notion that 
most of the knowable is known, and that sci- 
ence will remain as it was. But whoso pos- 
tulates that many things are yet to be discov- 
ered, and that some of his most precious 
theories may one day have to be given up or 
recast, and that it is a disgrace to stand still — 
that man will keep his heart warm and his in- 
terest close to the moving column. He can 
never become a mental fossil ; and though liv- 
ing into age, he shall die young. 

The medical profession must progress and 
grow in knowledge, and the new knowledge 
must make for higher usefulness. But we are 
in danger — and the more volatile of us are in 
most danger — from this very need. We are 
liable, if not likely, to be sidetracked in a pur- 
117 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

suit of one idea, and to be governed by it, 
and so lose our sense of proportion ; to become 
seized with a fad and try to square the world 
to it. The rapid progress of our science and 
art during the past few years has increased 
this danger, and we have had plentiful exam- 
ples of men being dominated by a single 
thought, and losing all judicial judgment. 
Some of the more enthusiastic of therm have 
had a new fad each decade for forty years. 
Hardly one of them has attained to great suc- 
cess in any way, unless the occasional riding 
into pecuniary fortune, possibly in the saddle 
of their fads, may be called success. 

No professional man has great success 
merely because he makes money — true suc- 
cess requires also usefulness to his public, loy- 
alty to the truth, the approval of the great 
body of his associates, and a clear conscience 
of his own. Thorough sanity and moderation 
in all our judgments is, therefore, the only 
safe ideal. There is more need now than ever 
before for this standard in the medical pro- 
fession. To " prove all things and hold fast 
to that which is true " has not ceased to be 
wisdom. We can be progressive and at the 
same time be sensible. 

We can be moderate and judicial, refuse to 
be stampeded either for or against a new doc- 
118 



SOME COMMENCEMENT IDEALS 

trine, and yet put every new truth to its best 
use. We have no warrant, simply because we 
have discovered a new fact, to throw our hats 
into the air and forget that this fact has a 
vital nexus with a hundred old truths that can- 
not be abandoned, and we will show our wis- 
dom by searching for that relation. If salva- 
tion ever comes to us it must be through all the 
truth, not a mere fragment of it. And a due 
sense of proportion — otherwise common sense 
— as an unswerving and insistent ideal is, in a 
workaday life, the best guide for a safe 
journey. 



119 



A Domestic Clearing House 



A Domestic Clearing House 



There is a good side to the habit of mind — 
one of the most common of all habits — which 
holds those things to be best that have had 
the sanction of centuries of usage. We do not 
lightly change our ways of life in the more 
vital things, although we do change, and 
sometimes change annually in the unvital 
things, and perhaps we progress. The human 
mind is not averse to looking at things in new 
ways, as we know by abundant examples in 
the past. But we are in danger of trying to 
make progress in defiance of the laws of na- 
ture; and, when we do that, we knock our 
heads against various obstacles. We some- 
times try to walk on the air or on the water, 
and deny that there is such a thing as matter ; 
but then we encounter practical difficulties 
that are troublesome. 

All our real progress has been made along 
123 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

the lines of demonstrated facts. Every effort 
which has discredited that standard has, sooner 
or later, come to grief. The history of the 
human race is littered with the wreckage of 
theories and cults that have gone to ruin 
through forgetfulness of this truth. 

When men emerged from barbarism and 
built houses, they thought themselves fortu- 
nate to be thus able to protect their bodies 
from storm and cold and heat. But it is a 
discovery of this later day that to vast num- 
bers of people house life is often a grievous 
misfortune. Countless thousands get sick be- 
cause they stay in houses too much; and the 
sick in large numbers recover by practically 
living out of doors. 

Who by any old-fashioned reasoning about 
things would ever have thought of killing 
mosquitoes to avoid ague and yellow fever? 
Or of looking through a human body from a 
dark box to see a nail in the stomach, or a 
bullet in the muscles? That such things are 
both possible and true gives us warrant to 
seek still other improvements in the conveni- 
ences of our lives, and other advantages over 
the adverse influences of nature in general and 
the enemies of the human race in particular. 

The search for happiness is as old as man 
and as constant as the sun ; albeit the quest is 
124 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

often poorly planned for success. To add to 
our comforts and to minimize our cares is the 
ambition of everybody. Efforts to enlarge our 
joys without harm are always commendable. 
And that a change in the ways of living ap- 
pears to violate custom and fixed notions is 
nothing against it, provided it offers a better 
average of happiness. All reforms have met 
with more or less opposition on the part of the 
people, except the reduction of the rate of post- 
age. But reforms should not be attempted 
carelessly. There are certain conditions that 
ought to be insisted upon as crucial for each 
one that is proposed. It must promise to lessen 
or abolish some evil, some cause of human 
grief ; or it must add to some comfort already 
possessed; or it must create a new pleasure 
that is not unwholesome; and withal, it must 
not do any countervailing injury. 

No innovation can be more laudable than 
one that shall give to our handicapped children 
a better start in life and more chances for a 
successful career. A love of childhood be- 
longs to most normal minds. Some people are 
interested solely in their own children; some 
are anxious to possess children of their own; 
they love them because they are their own — 
and work and fight for them for this reason. 
Others like children in general by a common 

"5 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

fondness that is inexplicable, hence instinctive. 
Others still are fond of them as the men and 
women of to-morrow — the potentiality of full- 
fledged citizens of the future. There are 
others who have no interest whatever in chil- 
dren or childhood ; and a few of these are fond 
of the lower animals. 

People who have no liking for children, 
or who dislike them, are usually more selfish 
than other people; and the devotion of par- 
ents to their children is often tainted with a 
selfish calculation that the children will re- 
turn to them the love and care later on. 
The failure of the children to do this is one 
of the most biting griefs of some parents 
in their old age. The parental love is not 
meant to be selfish, but it is selfish all the same. 
The child's carelessness of his own highest 
obligations as he grows up, and as his parents 
grow old, is likewise not intentional, but it is 
none the less wicked. 

It is an open question whether with a large 
minority of people the joys of parenthood, in 
the long run, outweigh its griefs and disap- 
pointments. The devotion of most children 
to their parents is one of the most exquisite 
pictures of human life. Their loyalty and 
tenderness are alone enough to make us be- 
lieve in heaven. But the selfish neglect and 
126 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

disrespect shown by some people toward par- 
ents who have slaved away their lives, and 
have foregone many comforts for their chil- 
dren, is one of the saddest chapters of human 
story — and it is a chapter that has abundant 
illustrations all about us. 

So it happens that the relations of children 
with parents are attended with a mixture of 
joy and grief. There ought to be much more 
joy than grief ; and any scheme that offers to 
increase the joys and reduce the griefs is a 
positive gain. Not only is there unhappiness 
between parents and children, but this often 
grows worse rather than better from year to 
year, and tends to warp the natures of both 
the parties. A more notable fact is that be- 
cause the parties are parents and children, the 
warping of the natures of both, especially of 
the children, is more rapid and more pro- 
nounced. This asymmetry is liable to occur 
even in cases where there is no special nervous 
friction between them. Take for illustration 
two nervous and irascible parents. Their chil- 
dren are hereditarily nervous. The irritable 
natures of the parents accentuate the nervous- 
ness of the children, and vice versa. Both par- 
ents are slightly abnormal, and in the same di- 
rection — the children are from birth usually 
more abnormal, and in the same way. And the 
127 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

parents and children usually rasp each other, 
consciously or unconsciously, and get each 
other out of patience often and often. This 
makes matters worse for both. They are irri- 
tated by the presence of each other, by the 
words and acts, and even by the looks of each 
other — they are oikiomaniacs, especially the 
children, who show it more violently than the 
parents do. 

Nature and the canons of society have tried 
to prevent all this by making it unlikely that 
couples closely alike by consanguinity, or 
otherwise, will marry. The effect of this in 
the children should be to counteract the ec- 
centricity of one parent by an opposite one of 
the other ; but all these efforts frequently fail, 
and a couple are doomed to see their own 
identical traits enlarged in their children. 
These traits are exaggerated in the children, 
and they grow worse by the daily impact of 
like traits of their parents. 

Why cannot some of this warping and un- 
happiness be lessened by wise and voluntary 
changes in the relations of parents and chil- 
dren? Must the misfits of these factors in 
society continue through years to do harm, 
simply because it is the fashion and tradition 
that people must raise their own children, and 
that most people think it unnatural and wrong 
128 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

not to? Parents have no ownership in their 
children. The children are free and respon- 
sible souls, with various moral and legal rights, 
soon after they are born. Parents usually for- 
get these facts, and assume that, since the chil- 
dren begin life as the most helpless of all be- 
ings, they must somehow be the property of 
their parents till they are of age, or longer. 

Misfit parents are sometimes divorced from 
each other by the courts as an act of pathetic 
justice. Ought not the children to have in 
some degree a similar privilege as to parents ? 
Now and then a child is divorced from his 
family by going to the reform school; but 
usually this occurs only when his misdemean- 
ors run against the interests of the public out- 
side of his own household. The reasons for 
his separation from his home, which arise out 
of the conditions within the family, are often 
quite as real and melancholy, if less notorious 
than those which carry him to the reforma- 
tory; and in these instances the parents and 
children are as a rule equally at fault, whether 
they know it or not. But are they equally re- 
sponsible? Are not the parents more respon- 
sible ? 

If all the parties could agree to strive un- 
selfishly to improve the race, as well as them- 
selves, the frequent separation of parents and 
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A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

children might increase their happiness and 
be a great advantage in many directions. Nu- 
merous examples in the observation of every 
thoughtful person should make this postulate 
clear, and I think ought to carry conviction to 
any reasonable mind. 

Here, for instance, are two nervous and 
very irascible parents. They are fastidious, 
captious, pragmatical, hypercritical; they flare 
up at trifles, and are always in more or less 
trouble. They have certain sensibilities to 
annoyance ; perhaps it is dirt, perhaps some no- 
tion peculiar to themselves. But they are peo- 
ple who are potent in moving the world. 
Their children are likely to have the same bent 
increased; they are more hyperesthetic and 
less calm and stable than their parents are, or 
were at their ages. If a door slams near by 
they jump as if they were shot ; and there are 
certain ways and words of others that always 
serve as sparks at which they explode in emo- 
tion or temper. 

Can anyone doubt that both the parents 
and children so constituted are made worse by 
every day's association together? The par- 
ents are always nervous and grow more so; 
and the children sometimes are so nervous 
as to seem to approach the borderland of ac- 
tual lunacy. To the abnormal and unwhole- 
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A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

some traits which they have transmitted to 
their children, parents add the exasperating- 
effect of increasing them by their own perpet- 
ual display of like qualities. 

In another part of the town is a pair of 
tranquil people who have some tranquil chil- 
dren. They all move along in a comfortable 
sort of way and trouble themselves little about 
the trifles of the world or the motion of the 
waters. They don't appear to love each other 
overmuch or with a show ; and they don't nag 
each other. A little excitement thrown into 
their lives might be useful to them — it would 
open their eyes. 

What a blessing if the children from that 
other and nervous household could be dropped 
down (and to stay) into this one! How they 
would grow and develop in a better way ! And 
their irritability would, like any other flame, 
grow less by lack of fuel to feed it. They 
would increase in tranquillity day by day. To 
have them in the family would be positive 
spice of life for these slow and undemonstra- 
tive parents, and they would be proud of the 
acuteness and the activity of these new chil- 
dren. They would themselves actually prick 
up their ears in consequence and grow some- 
what. 

On the other hand, if the slow and dull chil- 
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A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

dren could come into the nervous household, 
they would be entertained and awakened ; they 
would be spurred to activity and new occupa- 
tions that they would doubtless find at times 
amusing. The nervous adults of the house 
would perhaps take a more tranquil pace, and 
might at least be glad that they had children 
under their roof whose nerves were not grown 
on the surface of their bodies, and, like super- 
sensitive traps, ready to be snapped by a 
breath of air. In the end, all these people 
would be helped. 

It is perfectly manifest that the children of 
the two families which I have described ought 
to be swapped. Of course the same end would 
be accomplished if the parents could be 
swapped; but, on economic grounds, that 
would be less convenient than to swap the chil- 
dren. This arrangement would work great 
benefit to four sets of persons — two sets of 
parents and two groups of children. The nerv- 
ous parents would be soothed by the tranquil 
children, who would in turn be spurred to 
greater activity and usefulness. The quiet and 
slow-going parents, on the other hand, would 
be stimulated by the nervous children, who in 
turn would have their hyperesthesia calmed — 
they would learn better the great truth that 
tranquillity and imperturbability are the men- 
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A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

tal qualities that, in our strenuous civilization, 
are most of all to be coveted. 

Some parents love their children too demon- 
stratively. They not only carry this emotion 
on the surface of their lives like a flower on 
their clothes, but they insist on dissecting it, 
tearing asunder its petals and stamens, not to 
discover its construction — which they could 
never understand — but to see if it is growing. 
They are troubled if their children fail to act 
similarly; and the children learn to do this 
usually, or in disgust go to the opposite ex- 
treme. This makes for some happiness, but it 
incurs also a load of sorrow, for with these 
people happiness comes to depend so much on 
the finer surface amenities, that it is sure to be 
jarred more or less by the accidents of daily 
life. There can be no question as to the won- 
derful beauty of these amenities. Their ab- 
sence would be a distinct loss to life and so- 
ciety, but many families carry them too far, 
and if stolid children could be adopted by 
them, it would be a gain to the children ; and 
the loving and effervescent children taken into 
calmer families would bring there a kind of 
sunshine that their new parents had never 
dreamed of. Clearly, some swapping here 
would make for a sum total of more happi- 
ness ; at the same time the tendency to the 
133 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

growth of warped child natures would be les- 
sened. 

There are some foibles and sins that are 
transmitted from parents to their own children 
that adopted children are less likely to take. 
Some parents fib to their children, usually un- 
wittingly and carelessly, but the children see 
through the gauze and learn to manage their 
parents, usually or often by a counterplay of 
deception. Parents warn of punishments to 
come for possible transgressions; then forget 
or fear or hesitate to inflict the penalty. The 
children see this sham and grow deceitful; 
besides, it is more easy for them to learn de- 
ceit by reason of their inheritance from their 
parents — like parent, like child. These par- 
ents not only are dishonest with their children, 
but they are dishonest with their neighbors; 
and the children are quick to adopt such meth- 
ods themselves; these eccentricities of parents 
are liable to be increased in the adult lives of 
the children, to the harm and loss of society. 

Such children would be much profited if 
they could be adopted into families where the 
promise of a punishment to come is as impos- 
sible as any other sin of the days of barbarism, 
and where disingenuousness to a neighbor is 
unknown. Finding the new household to be 
managed in general on the basis of truth, 
134 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

candor, and good fellowship, the deceitful chil- 
dren would soon learn how cheap their meth- 
ods are, and grow better. Then if the deceit- 
ful and barbaric parents could adopt some 
children out of these better families, the chil- 
dren might work for them a like reformation. 
The exchange would be rather hard on the 
candid parents and their own honest children, 
who would be expected to reform the parents 
and children of the other families ; but a mis- 
sionary spirit is honorable, especially when it 
finds its object near at home; and good folks 
should be ready and willing to sacrifice their 
own comfort to some degree for the better- 
ment of others. What is our existence for if 
not to better others as well as ourselves? 

I have heard of parents who are averse to 
having children, and there can be little doubt 
that some of these would be glad enough to 
be rid of their children after they have them, 
provided that were possible without public 
censure, and with ease to a mental state they 
call conscience. But the clearing house pro- 
posed would insure that such children should 
be adopted into childless families of kindly 
people who would take good care of them. 
There would be kept a standing list of such 
families who are eager to give their lives and 
their love for children of their adoption — to 
135 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 



the great benefit of themselves, of the children, 
and of society at large. 

What objection can there be to an arrange- 
ment that would make these three groups of 
people happier — the children, and the two sets 
of parents? Why not try in this way to cor- 
rect some of the multifarious misfits of chil- 
dren and parents? The few instances I have 
cited are only typical examples ; and they show 
the need of some new and drastic remedy for 
a very common evil. 

I know the stock argument that one can 
never consent to " give up " or into the hands 
of another the children of his own flesh and 
blood; that it is unnatural; that nobody can 
be so good to a child as its own mother — and 
so on. But people do give up their children, 
more or less, when they marry them off. They 
very much give up their daughters then, and 
often find they have given up their sons ; and 
they frequently do this without the slightest 
difficulty, sometimes even with gladness, es- 
pecially if their own financial burdens are less- 
ened by the transaction. « 

The wealthy people nearly always give up 
their children three quarters of the time, and 
four fifths in substance, to nurses and at- 
tendants (the latter often selected with less 
discretion than they choose their clothesmak- 
136 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

ers) ; and they give them up to their own de- 
vices with their playmates, sometimes to their 
good, but often to their harm, a part of nearly 
every day. Not a few mothers are glad 
enough to trust their children to nurses, at- 
tendants, teachers, and playmates for as many 
hours a day as possible. 

Many times a mother finds herself so nerv- 
ous from the influence of her children and 
from the demands of society that she must go 
away from both of them and rest for days and 
weeks; then she certainly leaves her children 
to the care of others. This argument about 
not giving up children to other hands evi- 
dently needs to be shorn of some sophistry and 
a good deal of the rhapsody of egoism. 

The notion that no woman but the mother 
of a child can be as good to it as she is is a 
fallacy; it even has some of the earmarks of 
nonsense. The discreet nurse is often better 
to and better for the child than its own 
mother; and the child-loving foster mother is 
usually a safer guide for the best interests of 
the child. The mother usually does more 
things at the selfish behest of the child — things 
that are harmful to it — than the foster mother 
does. Besides, the mother is more likely to do 
foolish things for her child, when moved by 
the sentimental heresies of motherhood. Thus, 
137 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

when the child is sick, she refuses to have a 
nurse, but insists on sitting up and watching 
with it for many nights in succession; and 
then, so overcome by fatigue and drowsiness 
that she is worse than useless, she perhaps 
blunders and gives a poison instead of a dose 
of good medicine. A foster mother is not half 
so likely to be foolish and spoil in herself the 
good nurse the child needs ; she is more apt to 
be guided by sense, less likely to be swayed 
by the frenzy of an unstable conscience. Like 
the stepmother — and rather less unfairly 
treated than she — the foster mother never has 
had a fair judgment at the hands of her critics. 
There is not a more devoted person in the 
world. She not only worships her adopted 
child, but she sometimes worships real moth- 
erhood, and the idea of it in the child's mind, 
as benighted people cling to a fetish. Think 
of her avidity for a baby to cherish, leading 
her to actual theft to get one! Then of her 
guarding for years the secret that she is not 
the real mother — when invariably the child 
will love her more if it knows the truth ! For 
the child, as it grows up, must appreciate the 
truth that tender care and support which is 
unprompted by consanguinity is a finer thing 
by reason of this fact. 

The foster mother is usually a mother from 

138 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

deliberate design, not from accident ; and chil- 
dren once in her possession are, as a rule, 
cared for cheerfully. She is less disposed to 
give them over to the care and instruction of 
servants than natural parents are — that is, she 
is a little more likely to be normal in the 
bringing up of her children than are natural 
mothers. Moreover, under her care the chil- 
dren have relatively more chance for spon- 
taneous development; she is a trifle more apt 
to appreciate the fact that after a child is born 
it usually, through the influences of its imme- 
diate environment, evolves itself as to its in- 
tellectual and moral life, much more than it 
is ever " raised " by the set rules for its daily 
conduct. 

Almost the sole foolishness of the foster 
mother is to forget that her spiritual privilege 
is so much greater than that of the real mother 
that she ought to be very proud of it — instead 
of trying the usually impossible task of keep- 
ing her child all his life in ignorance of who 
she is and who he is. When the child finally 
discovers the truth — as he almost always does, 
and from alien if not unfriendly lips — his re- 
spect for the foster mother invariably falls 
a little. People cannot actually waste foolish- 
ness without stepping down from some of 
the pedestals on which their admirers have 
139 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

placed them. Forgiveness is blessed, but the 
need of it tends to lessen the love that is left. 
And this blindness of the foster mother not 
only does her injury in the end, when the truth 
comes out, but it robs the child of the great 
moral benefits that ought to come of the 
knowledge that his care and nurture have been 
due to the disinterested love of people not 
bound by law to keep him. 

It may be asked whether children growing 
up under the care of foster parents can have 
in after life a feeling toward them as tender 
and wholesome as they would toward blood 
parents. Does fosterage lessen the best qual- 
ity of filiality? I think not. Fosterage may 
change it a trifle, but the best essence of it 
comes to a child through a memory of the 
useful and permanently happifying things that 
have been done for him. The man recalls best 
and with most fervor of thankfulness those 
child benefits that gave him the inside track 
in his worthy ambitions. He easily forgets the 
candy and the caresses of his childhood; but 
those hints and favors that helped him to be a 
man among men and women, and to lead in 
his struggle for success, have made him an 
everlasting debtor to those who have helped 
him, and he rarely forgets this obligation. 
His gratitude goes out to the parent, the foster 
140 



A DOMESTIC CLEARING HOUSE 

parent, or the friend of his youth, about 
equally for equal help. The parent may easily 
lose this homage, and the foster parent or 
friend may gain it, but can anybody say that 
it is uncommendable or not of the best essence 
of filiality ? 



141 



The True Gospel of Sleep 



The True Gospel of Sleep 



In the popular mind there must be some 
mistakes about sleep, so variant and dissimi- 
lar are the current notions of our need of it, 
of the effects of it, and of the lack of it. All 
the theories about sleep cannot be correct; 
some of them must be wide of the mark. 

One man is sure that for health and strength 
he needs only four or five hours of sleep out 
of each day of twenty- four hours; he has 
demonstrated this thesis experimentally, for 
himself, over and over again; it is his gospel 
of sleep ; and he quote numerous people above 
childhood who have like views and experi- 
ences. Another thinks he must have eight or 
nine hours and cannot do with less, and, as all 
men tend to measure others by the yardstick 
that fits themselves, he is sure to believe that 
no one should have less than one third of his 
existence spent in sleep. 
145 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

Many physicians freely teach this latter 
view, and insist that children especially must 
have an abundance of sleep or be in peril of 
nervous and mental bankruptcy. We are told, 
and have long taught, that infants should sleep 
a large part of the time, especially during their 
first year, in order to be safe from calamity 
to their brains. A large measure of sleep is 
surely useful, as well as convenient, for all 
babies ; yet there are instances of infants and 
small children who have for many months to- 
gether slept less than four hours in the twenty- 
four, and come out of the experience with 
vigorous minds and bodies. 

Great numbers of adults in our modern life 
of high nervous tension are victims of insom- 
nia, more now than ever before, and the num- 
ber is apparently increasing rather rapidly in 
certain communities. Drugs to produce sleep 
were never in such demand as now ; were never 
used so freely, both as a temporary expedient 
and as a daily habit; they are sold in vast 
quantities all over the nervous world, and are 
used according to the whim of the sleepless, 
more often without than with the advice of 
their physicians. Insomnia is therefore a fa- 
vorite harvest field of the exploiter of " pat- 
ent " nostrums, for he well knows that, when 
driven to desperation by sleeplessness, its vic- 
146 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

tim is ready to do anything or take anything 
that promises relief; and if sleep comes as an 
effect of a drug he is ready to forgive other 
and perhaps resulting ills, some of which may 
in the end be worse than the insomnia. And 
the other ills that come of the habitual use of 
soporifics are many and grave, and range all 
the way from trifling inconvenience to severe 
sickness and death. 

Possibly some of the sleeping potions may 
do good by helping to sleep without inflicting 
any incidental harm to the system ; but the evi- 
dence is strong and accumulating that most, if 
not all, of the soporific drugs do harm in some 
way, especially the coal-tar products, and 
all those that produce their effects by obtund- 
ing the sensibility of the nervous system. 
While their use may be justified by an oc- 
casional exigency, they are in the main mis- 
chievous, because, if for no other reason, 
they undertake a function and do a thing 
for the body that good hygiene and a better 
course of living should as a rule make un- 
necessary. 

The testimony of the sufferers with insom- 
nia certainly seems, on the face of it, to con- 
firm their theory of the seriousness of this 
affliction, for they find that a night without 
sleep, even if they are in bed, with their bodies 
147 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

resting, more or less unfits them for the duties 
of the coming day, and that after a good night 
they are fresh and strong and satisfied. And 
these data are correct; after a wakeful night 
these people are unnerved for the day, and af- 
ter a night of good sleep they are fit and cheer- 
ful. Whether their theory is correct, that lack 
of sleep alone does the mischief, is another 
question, and there is reason to doubt the the- 
ory, and to suspect, if not to know, that the 
insomnia is only one of the several factors in 
the problem, one of several co-results of a 
common and another cause, and not itself the 
sole cause of all the harm. 

It is evident that the victims believe implic- 
itly in the current theory. They easily come 
to dread a sleepless night ; being awake in bed 
in the dark becomes to them hades, veritably ; 
they look forward to such a possibility with 
nervous apprehension if not horror, which 
makes them less likely to sleep ; indeed, it often 
prevents sleep completely. In the throes of 
wakefulness, when they have gone to bed for 
the purpose of sleeping, they become so an- 
noyed and agitated as to make sleep hard, or 
impossible, to court; they count up and down 
long columns of numbers, they say the alpha- 
bet, and repeat the multiplication table or 
their prayers in their efforts to entice slumber, 
148 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

but unavailingly. So they lie awake tossing 
in restlessness and chagrin till morning; and 
afterwards they look back on the experience 
with a sense of gloom. No nightmare could 
be so terrible. 

It is not unnatural that they should attribute 
their bad symptoms to the lack of sleep, for 
that is the easiest conclusion, but it is only 
half true if true at all. It is vastly important 
in this study to keep the horse in front of the 
cart, for the tendency is strong to reverse 
them. The true story is that the horrors of in- 
somnia are slightly or only moderately due to 
want of sleep — very much more due to insom- 
niphobia, with which, in some degree, nearly 
every such patient permits himself unneces- 
sarily and foolishly to become afflicted. His 
experience is analogous to that of the victim of 
consumption who has night sweats. This lat- 
ter believes, till he is taught otherwise and bet- 
ter, that his bad day is due to the night sweat 
preceding it. This is a most unscientific infer- 
ence. Really, the bad day and the sweats are 
co-results of another and a different influence ; 
they are not cause and effect. When the pa- 
tient learns this truth, and that the sweat is 
not harmful in itself, but a possible benefit by 
the expulsion of poison from his body, he dis- 
covers that it is only a trifling inconvenience, 
149 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

not a calamity, and he bears it with equanim- 
ity if not with actual pleasure. 

The victim of insomnia is equally wrong 
and equally unfortunate in his reasoning 
about his case. He honestly believes that loss 
of the sleep which he thinks is his due is 
fraught with the certainty of great injury ; he 
laments his infirmity and often fears he will 
become insane, and he may invite insanity by 
his worry, when, if he could stop his fretting, 
he would find himself hurt very little, if at all, 
by it. The very attitude of his mind when he 
goes to bed tends to keep him awake, for he is 
in a state of mental expectancy of insomnia, 
and the longer his slumber is delayed the more 
demoralized he becomes, the more exalted is 
his irritation, and the less likely is he to fall 
asleep. What is worse, he is very unhappy 
about it, he fumes and profanates his priv- 
ileges ; and this mood tends still more strongly 
against slumber. 

If he can go to bed and sincerely resolve 
that he does not wish to sleep, but would 
rather keep awake all night, and perhaps read 
an unexciting book or otherwise try to drive 
off slumber ; if he can bring his mind genuinely 
and ingenuously to this mood, which is one of 
pleasure at being awake — then he will prob- 
ably soon fall asleep, and so remain the night 
150 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

through. The chief thing is the mood of 
pleasure, or, lacking that, stoical indifference 
as to whether sleep comes or not ; these emo- 
tions make the terror impossible, and bring 
sufficient sleep in nearly every case — not eight 
hours it may be, but enough ; certainly enough 
to prove that this measure is far safer and 
wiser than the common resort to soporific 
drugs. 

There is another truth that is even more 
fundamental than the one just referred to, a 
truth that is substantially never mentioned by 
students of this subject. This is that our the- 
ory is wrong that we should go to bed and stay 
there eight or ten hours a day for the chief 
purpose of sleeping. Sleep, go to sleep; get 
asleep; sleep is the great restorer; blessed 
sleep — these are the cries that always ring in 
our ears, and that have probably in some form 
rung in the ears of all the recent generations 
as a guide in life, and as indicating the drift 
of thought about sleep. But it is a narrow and 
one-sided view. Of course sleep rests the 
tired brain, and lets its thinking cortical cells 
recuperate from the strain of labor that has 
lowered them; but what of the weal of the 
tired body whose tissues have been lowered 
by the work of the day ? This need has been 
almost wholly neglected in our scheme of rea- 
151 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

soning, and the poor body has had to get what 
benefit it may as an incident of the sleep. On 
the contrary, we should go to bed to rest the 
tired body and let sleep come as an incident; 
rest of the body should be the chief aim ; if we 
will go to bed with that purpose the sleep will 
mostly take care of itself. Man can by his 
own volition send his body to bed as readily 
as he can chop his wood, and so his body rests ; 
but sleep comes as a consequence of the con- 
ditions of his body and brain; and some of 
these conditions are fatigue, horizontal pos- 
ture, quietness, silence, and darkness to shut 
out disturbing mental impressions and to in- 
cline the brain against thinking. Sleep does 
not come and never can come by an act of the 
will, as one rises and walks. The brain puts 
itself to sleep as its physical conditions entice, 
and quite regardless of the will. 

With an active physical life, the body should 
probably rest horizontal about one third of the 
time; and it is not necessary that the brain 
should be unconscious in sleep all this while. 
Perhaps no one sleeps too much; sleep can 
hardly injure the brain ; but we have had an 
extreme estimate of the amount of sleep which 
it is indispensable that a rested body should 
have. This is a most practical truth; and 
every insomniac who gets himself down to or 
152 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

up to this mental basis begins at once to bene- 
fit from it, and he finds that lying awake an 
hour or two of a night, or before rising in the 
morning, is not only not harmful, but is not 
specially unpleasant ; darkness ceases to be ter- 
rible to him, and he finds he can have good 
thoughts as well as bad ones, when he is alone 
with himself in the silence of the night. Then 
he is surprised to find his terror gone; he 
ceases to be an insomniphobiac, and becomes 
a happy philosopher. 

But this mental basis is one of the hardest 
things in all the experiences of life for the 
distraught poor sleepers to reach. It is hard 
for them to change their philosophy of sleep 
and their habits about it. They unconsciously 
and unwittingly come to regard the act of ly- 
ing in bed awake in the night as a punishment, 
if not a sin. They are chagrined if they do 
not drop off to sleep promptly on going to bed ; 
and if they awaken before daylight they fret 
till rising time, or they get up before their rest 
is over because they are awake. Is man so 
weak and mean an animal that he cannot en- 
dure in bed at night the waking presence of 
himself alone, but must have the constant wak- 
ing company of his kind or of the light — or 
perhaps of his dog! 

This fuming tendency of the mind is a most 

153 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

interesting trait, but a most unfortunate ex- 
perience. It is quite as likely to reveal itself 
about a trifle as for the momentous things of 
life. A man will be extremely annoyed and 
impatient because you keep him taking a pill 
three times a day for weeks, although the pill 
is sugar-coated, is swallowed easily, and pro- 
duces not a symptom of which he is conscious. 
If it were a sugar-coated bread pill, and he did 
not know this, he would grieve about it as 
freely. And we are all witnesses of countless 
lamentations of people because of trifling dis- 
charges from their throats and noses, of harm- 
less mucus each day. We know and they 
know that no pain or discomfort comes of it, 
yet they are in daily terror of the awful con- 
sequences they suppose to attend this trifling 
thing labeled catarrh that harms no one. So 
we suffer ourselves to be terrified by an hour 
more of conscious life each day than we guess 
to be normal — an hour more of ourselves. 
How foolish we are ! 

It is hard to unlearn the lessons of a life- 
time, especially when they are reinforced by 
beliefs that are hereditary from a thousand 
generations of usage, and to see as agreeable 
some things that have always been held to be 
disagreeable. The sleep problem illustrates 
this truth most vividly. 
154 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

One of the hardest sides of the problem is 
the contention that much less than the classical 
eight hours of daily sleep will do. But there are 
many facts to prove this thesis. People who 
lie abed long hours reading, sleep correspond- 
ingly little, and they live as long and keep as 
well as the average. It is notorious that many 
eminent men of history have slept little, and 
I think hardly one who can be called an in- 
tellectual giant has been accustomed to a large 
amount of sleep. Nor is it necessary that chil- 
dren, even infants, should have as much sleep 
as we have supposed. Many years ago my 
eyes were opened by an experience with a 
wakeful baby. He slept only about three or 
four hours a day on an average for a year, as 
shown by the most accurate records. This 
wakefulness was due, apparently, to some 
nervous predisposition. Quieting drugs were 
tried, but it was soon found that dangerously 
large doses would be required to increase his 
sleep materially; and so, fearing the drugs 
more than the insomnia, his management was 
confined to good nursing and good nutrition. 
I fully expected that the child's brain would 
be permanently harmed by this experience, but 
nothing of the sort occurred. At the end of a 
year and a half he was sleeping better, and by 
the end of his second year he was getting as 
155 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

much sleep as the average child of his age, 
and he was well and vigorous and had a good 
mind. Then a strange thing happened ; he be- 
gan to sleep more than other children, and by 
his sixth year, when he entered school, he was 
sleeping about fourteen hours daily. By his 
tenth year he apparently had paid back to 
Nature what had been lost, and was sleeping 
like other children of his age. He was per- 
fectly well in mind and body, active and mis- 
chievous, and was well abreast of his school- 
mates in his studies. One such case is enough 
to demolish the theory that a child must, that 
all children must, sleep a great deal or be 
ruined. 

It is a common experience for a man to put 
off his bedtime until a late hour because he 
thinks he cannot sleep till then ; or to walk or 
work so as to tire his body profoundly before 
going to bed, in order that he shall be sure to 
sleep; or to get up at an absurdly early hour 
in the morning, because he has awakened and 
cannot sleep any longer. In all these ways he 
is wrong, for in them all he follows the bad 
principle that we should go to bed chiefly for 
sleep. We are foolishly unhappy by lying in 
bed awake, in the dark, and with nothing to do. 
We are worse than children afraid of ghosts. 
It is an unreasonable and unreasoning fear, 

156 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

and one that any sensible person should have 
no difficulty in putting aside. 

The body ought to be well rested every day, 
and in the horizontal posture. The erect po- 
sition that is maintained through nearly all 
our waking hours makes this indispensable. 
We are physically handicapped as compared 
with the fourfooted beasts; we need more 
rest of body than they, and rest horizontal ; 
and if we get enough rest of body we usually 
get enough sleep, if we only let ourselves sleep, 
and do not prevent it by worrying. But we 
should, as far as possible, seek those physical 
conditions that encourage sleep while we are 
resting. That rest of body is more necessary 
than much sleep, and that insomnia is clearly 
provoked by an easily prevented mental mood, 
are not reasons for us to neglect any of the 
obvious aids to easy slumber. These ought to 
be studied carefully and used resolutely. 

Light keeps some people awake; usually 
more than need be, because they worry about 
it and magnify it as an impediment. Most 
people can have their bed hours in the dark ; 
they can either go to bed early enough to have 
eight dark hours, or they can darken their 
rooms. Many are kept awake by noises ; often 
needlessly kept awake by trifling sounds that 
would be wholly negligible save for their pro- 
157 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

pensity to be nagged by them. The irritation 
grows by indulgence ; every time they hear the 
sounds and regard them as annoying, the hor- 
ror grows. If the noises are produced by peo- 
ple or by animals, and therefore may be pre- 
ventable, the hatefulness is usually greater; 
the sounds of the wind and waves and rain, 
or even gentle thunder, are less sleep-killing 
than the coughing or snoring of an innocent 
neighbor or the distant barking of a dog. 
Most persons can overcome much of any 
morbid sensitiveness to sound that they may 
have, if they understand these truths and will 
be sensible. But few will try hard enough and 
be wise enough for this consummation; and 
so some remedy for the noises of creation is 
proper for such people, if a remedy that is 
not hurtful can be found. The measure re- 
sorted to for this purpose must be mostly sub- 
jective; the noises themselves can be con- 
trolled but little; they must be kept out; the 
sound waves must be prevented from entering 
the ears. Cotton stuffed into the ear channels 
does a little good, but some waves pass 
through it unless it is packed in so firmly as 
to cause discomfort, which of course renders 
the device nugatory. A cloth or other dress- 
ing tied over the ears may keep out many 
noises, but here again the apparatus, in order 

158 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

to be efficient, must press so tightly as to do 
more harm than good. The thing needed is an 
air-tight, non-vibrating stopper for the ears; 
one that will not itself make a disagreeable 
sensation by pressure or otherwise ; one that is 
easily applied by the patient himself ; and one 
that is harmless. 

Common paraffin seems to fill these condi- 
tions; it is easily used, is harmless and won- 
derfully efficient. A small mass of the sub- 
stance is warmed in the mouth, chewed perhaps 
to soften it the more rapidly, and is then 
pressed firmly but gently into the ear. It 
adjusts itself instantly to the ear tube, hardens 
as it cools, and remains an almost complete 
bar to the passage of sound waves, without 
producing a disagreeable sensation, indeed, 
with so little sensation of any sort that its 
presence is soon forgotten. It is applied at 
bedtime and removed by a finger in the morn- 
ing; or it may be worn during the day, if it 
comforts the patient, but not all the day, for 
fear of interfering with the normal drying of 
the external ear. It may be used in this way 
for a long time with no harm of any sort, and 
with the great advantage that it makes the 
patient nearly, or quite, independent of the un- 
avoidable noises of his environment. This 
device may render it unnecessary to go to the 
159 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

country to sleep in order to escape from the 
city noises; it may make it less necessary to 
keep the children still to avoid waking their 
elders, and it may help the sensitive children 
to finish their day naps in spite of the noises 
about them. 

Many people sleep poorly for want of suf- 
ficient clothing in bed; coldness of the feet is 
especially apt to keep them awake. A good 
bed is needful, for it rests the body most, and 
so helps toward sleep. The remedies for these 
defects are obvious, but often beyond reach. 
A spread-out newspaper placed between the 
blankets has the heat-keeping power of an- 
other blanket — and old newspapers are cheap. 
Overfeeding often produces insomnia, if it 
does not make the drowsiness of indigestion, 
causing heavy sleep in the early evening and 
miserable wakefulness afterwards; hunger 
sometimes prevents sleep at night — corrected 
by a cup of bread and milk at bedtime; and 
overstimulation, especially with coffee and tea, 
is often fatal to good sleep. These troubles 
are always correctable. Only a little common 
sense and a trifle of courage are needful. A 
loaded large intestine often keeps a sensitive 
person awake for half the night, when a 
prompt evacuation would relieve the insomnia 
for the time completely. 
1 60 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

Foul air to breathe is a frequent cause of 
wakefulness ; for this, the remedy is fresh air 
in great abundance; and people do not take 
cold on account of well-ventilated bedrooms, 
even draughty ones. I know the current 
thought of the world is against this statement, 
but the " world " is wrong — and its error is 
killing thousands of good people each year, 
some of whom ought to be kept alive, for they 
might be a benefit to society. 

When people are up and about they rarely 
become sleepy because their brains are tired. 
They often are sleepy when up and about, but 
this is mainly due to fatigue of the body, or 
to some fault of the digestive organs. Sleep 
comes normally with a normal and unabused 
body that has been fatigued a little and then 
put to rest; and it is helped by cessation of 
active thinking, by darkness, by stillness, by 
mental tranquillity and a happy spirit. These 
things are first to be secured if possible ; then 
the sleep comes as a natural consequence and, 
with hardly an exception, in sufficient amount. 
The sleep is secondary, not primary; these 
other things are primary and of surpassing 
importance. 

Nor must we count the hours of our slum- 
ber for fear it is not enough ; that would break 
the charm of the influence and spoil the game. 
161 



THE TRUE GOSPEL OF SLEEP 

We may keep a record if we like, and it may 
be useful for our amusement, and to help de- 
termine the exact amount of sleep that, in 
our social zone, is physiologic for the man, 
woman, and child of the present century, with 
their varying orders of enlightenment and 
manifold grades of work and play. Now no 
man can tell just what that amount of sleep 
is; and this question can never be settled by 
one poor slave of insomnia, or by a thousand 
of them, and the question can wait. It will 
profit each of these unfortunates to neg- 
lect the race interests for his own, and to put 
his mind, in the calmest sincerity, to the task 
of saving himself from his thraldom — and the 
task need not be hard nor its benefits un- 
certain. 



162 



Some Unconceded Rights of 
Parents and Children 



Some Unconceded Rights of 
Parents and Children 



It would appear to be a truism that parents 
and their own children are of all people best 
fitted to live together and be comforting and 
helpful to each other. And probably this is 
the rule; but there are exceptions to it. The 
rule means the average folk or those near 
the average, who have no traits or habits that 
mark them as peculiar or abnormal, and whose 
bodies are symmetrical and undeformed, for 
certain deformities of the body go with men- 
tal eccentricities almost to a certainty. The 
exceptions to the rule are the persons who have 
some mental or bodily deformity; and in the 
aggregate they are a numerous company. A 
large proportion of them are among the in- 
tellectual, refined, and forceful people, some of 
whom are a moving influence in human af- 
fairs. 

165 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

All the geniuses of every sort belong to this 
latter class, and some of them are strong and 
capable, but many have little force for use- 
ful things. While their peculiarities are, in 
a few cases, endowments for power in some 
direction, these folks are all more or less 
handicapped in the struggles of life, for they 
lack mental steadiness and equilibrium. They 
easily tire, often have unstable purposes and 
judgment. They are a class whose families 
are usually running out, and giving place to 
the more strong, tranquil, and evenly balanced 
people that are constantly coming up from the 
so-called lower orders of society. Their ranks 
are perpetually replenished by this better 
stock; and this, touched in its turn by the 
blight of our tensive civilization, finally goes 
to the wall in the same way. Thus, what we 
wrongly call the lower strata of society be- 
come the race-saving ones — they are the better 
ones. They constantly tend to rise and crowd 
the others out of existence ; so there is a con- 
tinuous mutation going on among the orders 
of society, like the geologic compounds of the 
earth's crust. There is no problem about the 
plain, tranquil people ; they take care of them- 
selves — or the fates of their so-called betters 
are providing for them. The great puzzle is 
to know what to do for the exceptional ones, 
166 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

the erratic specimens who have noble qual- 
ities and acute misfortunes. 

These erratic people often irritate each 
other, even parents and children, and unwit- 
tingly accentuate each other's morbidness; 
without bad motives they often cause a flood 
of mutual unhappiness. They are all lame 
in some direction, and for that reason, if for 
no other, they are entitled to the largest con- 
sideration and all the helps that are possible. 

Nearly all the aberrations I have indicated 
are inborn ; they could hardly come into exist- 
ence after birth, yet in many cases they in- 
crease during the life of the individual. This 
increase is produced by the influences of en- 
vironment, and these are often some unappre- 
ciated force or set of forces that continue a 
harmful pressure for many years. Such forces 
are often searched for and seldom found; in 
our blundering we look in the wrong direc- 
tions for them, and then refuse to recognize 
them when they are found ; many of the most 
potent of them are unconceded, and so little or 
nothing is done in a logical way to counteract 
them. 

Some of the defects of these people are phys- 
ical, and are plainly manifest to others. They 
show in stature, color, complexion, shape of 
body, and features, in deformities that may be 
167 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

annoying to the eye, like unsymmetrical ears 
or eyes, in misshapen faces and heads, or in 
a general lack of bodily vigor. The victims 
are only too well aware of these peculiarities, 
and would be free of them if they could; 
everybody would be symmetrical and beautiful 
of body if it were in his power to be. But 
only the lack of general vigor or some slight 
weakness of a special organ can be helped 
much by any exercise or education. All the 
rest of these faults are fixed and will last till 
death. These we must bear, with such phi- 
losophy as we have. 

The most important defects after that of lack 
of vigor are of the mind and nervous system ; 
they are eccentricities of mind, unusual likes 
and dislikes, egoistic tangents and emotional 
impulses. These tell in disposition and con- 
duct. They are temperamental, and fix the 
place of the individual in society; they order 
his happiness or misery, and measure the peace 
of those about him ; they determine his career 
in life, his success in business, his reputation 
among people — even the manner and time of 
his death. 

The most hopeful fact about this class of de- 
fects is that, since they are founded in the 
relative degrees of development, and the rela- 
tion of the functions of the cerebral cells, they 
168 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

are to some slight degree at least, correctible 
by the effect of education, and the regulation 
of mental and moral influences, especially 
when these influences are continued through 
years of time. A long nose cannot be short- 
ened by any amount of cultivation ; but an in- 
tense trait of mind may be lessened a little by 
long enforced disuse, as one that is too weak 
may grow somewhat by systematic exercise 
long continued. 

It is to the unspeakable interest of these 
afflicted ones that their faults of mind be 
first correctly diagnosed; that their causes be 
found out ; and then that the right correctives 
be put to work and be continued as long as 
they can be useful. These are two very diffi- 
cult, often impossible, things to accomplish. 
Moreover, the task is apt to be a most thank- 
less one; the victim to be helped is likely to 
object, and to disbelieve in the value of the 
corrective, and early to grow tired of it, and 
then to refuse to believe in its good effect 
when it comes. For this reason, as well as on 
account of its inherent difficulties, the prob- 
lem is one that strongly appeals to every spirit 
of true philanthropy. 

The mental traits referred to are numerous 
and peculiar. They stamp a man as lacking 
much or little in general mental or nervous 
169 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

balance. He is perhaps too nervous or too 
lethargic, too smart or too dull. His tastes 
are too acute and critical, or he has little or 
no critical sense. He has too much or too lit- 
tle candor and frankness. His egoism is large 
in the direction of covetousness and avarice 
or of jealousy or envy; or he is so easy-going 
and careless of himself that he is a nearly use- 
less member of society. If he is too grasping 
he may become a cheat, a kleptomaniac, or a 
common thief; if too little so he will lack in- 
dustry, be lazy and easily imposed upon; will 
be unable to accumulate property, but will 
foolishly give it away ; he will have an unvig- 
orous nature and may end in the poorhouse. 

If his tastes are extremely esthetic he will 
have intense joy in artistic things and habits, 
and in people who are artistic according to his 
standards. But, unless he is a philosopher, 
he is born to a heritage of lifelong carking 
at the blemishes and wrongs that are all 
around him ; the dirt and squalor, and the un- 
fitness of things. If his tastes are too dull he 
will tend to revert toward barbarism ; he may 
not get far in that direction, but his life will 
be a heedless and lazy one. 

All such warpings work for social demoral- 
ization, and for weakness of the race as a 
whole; never for the general balance and the 
170 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

common strength. They make for the grief 
of their victims, and still more for the fatigue 
of their friends. They are the moral casual- 
ties of the march of human progress, and the 
gloom of their affliction can be lifted only a 
little by any of our efforts to discover and cor- 
rect them. 

Nature seems always to be trying to prevent 
such defects, and to keep the human race sym- 
metrical and up to a high standard of power. 
But the efforts often miscarry, and so the 
harm comes, and after the children are born 
with the blight upon them we usually, in our 
blind faith in the infallibility of nature, refuse 
or fail to lift a finger to correct them. We 
hide from our consciousness the very exist- 
ence of their failings, or, if we discover them, 
we take them for evidence of the inscrutable 
workings of the Almighty, and as something 
that cannot be helped. Some believe it is 
wicked even to try to correct them. 

The abnormalities that I have described 
usually come to the children by reason of too 
great likeness in mental traits of the parents 
or grandparents. And nature tries to prevent 
this by encouraging marriage between persons 
of positive if not extreme mental and physical 
unlikeness. The brunette naturally seeks the 
blond; the nervous person fancies the calm; 
171 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

the big loves the petite; the rude seeks the 
gentle; strength is tender toward the weak 
and dependent; and the weak lean upon the 
strong; while the prejudice against marriages 
of consanguinity is almost universal. But 
nature blunders ; she is often foiled by propin- 
quity or the lack of it, by diffidence and hesi- 
tation on the part of young people, by the 
often benighted bias of friends and others, and 
especially by the blindness of the impulsive 
bundle of emotions called love. Probably not 
more than one marriage in four is made ac- 
cording to the natural ideal in every particular. 
The other three are more or less of a com- 
promise which one or both the parties is im- 
pelled by various circumstances to make. 

The marriage of couples having like traits 
in excess of the common (and the word trait 
always implies a mental quality a little beyond 
the average) tends to greater excess of similar 
traits in their children, and so down the years 
interminably. Thus, through a succession of 
natal faults, to which may be added numerous 
after influences, we have the neurotic, the in- 
tense, the eccentric and the dull — all becom- 
ing, or liable to become, worse rather than 
better through succeeding generations. 

These unstable tendencies are deplorable ; in 
the main they are misfortunes pure and sim- 
172 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

pie. Only a few of them, and far between, 
come to be useful in the world; these belong 
to the few geniuses whose unusual powers in 
practical ways are of value to mankind; but 
their contributions are mostly in the direction 
of amusement, rarely in the realm of work. 
The valuable discoveries of the geniuses are 
usually in fields where numerous students have 
been hunting along the same lines, and search- 
ing for results that have been foreseen by 
many minds. We are apt to call great that 
man out of many who first happens to find 
the sought-for thing. But his superiority to 
the other workers in his field is usually the ac- 
cident of getting into print a day earlier than 
the rest. 

For the weal of the individual as well as of 
society, mental balance is to be sought; poise 
is above all else to be prayed for ; a sane sense 
of proportion is the goal. The child who is 
born with an aberrant tendency has a natural 
right to every influence that can help him cor- 
rect it. Beyond his right to the four prime 
necessities of physical existence (food, shel- 
ter, clothes, and warmth), he has no greater 
claim on the world than this. He demands, 
all enlightened people demand, a fifth favor 
in life made up of education, entertainment, 
and pleasure ; and his right is to have this fifth 
173 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

boon so ordered that it shall increase his weak 
powers and repress his excessive and abnor- 
mal ones. It is the duty of everyone respon- 
sible for him, as it is his own duty, to aid in 
this consummation. 

It is a safe postulate that the mentally 
warped child (not the mental defect as we 
understand imbecility, which is not inherited, 
but the result of a physical accident) has one 
or two similarly warped parents or grand- 
parents, or those who showed similar tenden- 
cies at his age. That is the reason of his 
warping; his and their aberrations are of the 
same general character. 

It is equally axiomatic that the peculiarity 
that has descended to the child is usually in- 
creased by living with people having the same 
peculiarity, whether they be parents or other 
persons. This is especially true of nervous, 
erratic, and highly sensitive children and par- 
ents. The quality already too highly wrought 
grows worse by association with people of its 
kind. It is logical to suppose that, living with 
people of opposite tendencies, the excessive 
traits would decrease to some degree; cer- 
tainly they would be less likely to grow, and 
this is the way it works in actual practice. A 
phlegmatic child may be helped to a normal 
basis by alert and nervous associates, but a 
174 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

nervous child never. An egoistic and fiction- 
building child will be helped by playmates 
who are simple in their ways and literal in 
the truth telling — seldom by one of his own 
kind. 

Parents with like traits are made worse and 
often tired out by the nervous and wearing 
ways of their children. The same excessive 
qualities grow more acute and rasping in each, 
the longer they live together. Of the two, the 
nervous and emotional parents are hurt most, 
for they have their normal solicitude for the 
children added to the nagging they endure 
from them. The children, because of their in- 
herited emotionalism, often take advantage of 
the parents, and become selfish and unapprecia- 
tive, and demand all manner of attention and 
favors, which they often get, and in the get- 
ting become more abnormal. 

By an apparent paradox it happens that 
when the parent does much for the child the 
latter grows dependent and selfish, and comes 
to demand more and more; whereas, if the 
parent is selfish and demands much of the 
child, the latter often learns to give much, and 
grows unselfish, loving, and thoughtful — the 
divinest nature of all the race. This is a 
strange comment on our ideals of domestic 
life; and it is no paradox, but just what we 
175 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

might expect to occur in a large proportion of 
cases. 

Erratic parents and children are usually 
mental and moral misfits. They are poorly 
prepared to help each other, and amazingly 
endowed to do each other harm. The harm 
to the children is almost endless, for it may 
go down to other generations; the injury to 
the parents — beyond the harm it works on 
their own children — may end with their own 
lives. Such children and parents ought not 
to be together much, they ought to live apart, 
at least during the developing time of the chil- 
dren's lives, and any power that can bring this 
about, whether it be an ordered purpose or 
any of the accidents of fate, is a boon to both 
parties. Even death itself may come to save 
from ruin the surviving party; for a life 
dragged out as a nervous wreck, or lived as a 
discredit to itself, is worse than death. 

The erratic children who have erratic par- 
ents ought to be put into families free from 
influences that can increase their bad habits; 
the nervous children into tranquil families, and 
vice versa, so that the parents as well as the 
children may be helped. By this plan the 
errors of inheritance would be in part cor- 
rected; the overgrown disagreeable qualities 
would be repressed, or, from disuse, would 
176 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

escape excessive growth; and the dormant, 
the dwarfed, and undeveloped ones might 
grow and be useful in the world's business. 
The small children usually do better in fam- 
ilies, but the older ones are well enough off 
in any good boarding school. A long visit 
away from home and among friends or rela- 
tives who will not be foolishly indulgent often 
starts a good tendency of mind and soul that 
lasts through life. 

Tired-out parents with prostrate nervous 
powers often find it needful to send their boys 
and girls away to boarding schools to get rid 
of the care and worry of them. It is the sal- 
vation of many parents, who otherwise might 
be nervously ruined. It helps many mothers 
to recover from neurasthenia, and it is usually 
a benefit to the children ; for such a mother has 
ceased to be valuable to her child, and daily 
grows worse by trying to care for it. It is a 
nervous child's moral right, as it ought to be 
his legal right, to live among tranquil, sanely 
tranquil, people. The nervous and over- 
wrought children are benefited by going away 
from their overwrought parents. Living to- 
gether they nag and irritate each other and 
both grow worse. The personal influences 
which the children find in the new environ- 
ment rub against them in a fresh and usually 
177 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

an agreeable fashion and so soothe their irrita- 
tion. It benefits them also to be among 
strangers, where they often rise to the best 
aspirations and conduct that they are capable 
of; they start there a new life guided by mo- 
tives that to many may be wholly novel ; they 
become more tranquil and self-controlled, less 
cantankerous, more considerate of the feel- 
ings and interests of others, less selfish. The 
new life is an inspiration to them ; new ideals 
spring up, and better emotions come to be the 
guiding force within them. 

Nervous and erratic people of all ages, 
when living together, tend toward oikiomania. 
They are irritated by the presence of their 
own people, and annoyed by each other's ways 
and habits and talk — that is what oikiomania 
means. This tendency is greater if the family 
is small and the members must pay much at- 
tention to each other; that is, if the personal 
factors in the family are few. Strangers and 
people outside their own households have a 
personal effect to counteract this tendency, 
and living with them may cure it entirely. 
This is a well-known truth, and it explains 
much of the benefit that comes to these handi- 
capped children when they go away from 
home to school or to live in other families. It 
is an argument in favor of a cosmopolitan life 

i 7 8 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

begun early in the child's career. The unfor- 
tunate child has a moral right to be placed in 
an environment that will put at rest, as far as 
is possible, his vicious tendency and his pecul- 
iar irritability, as well as in one that will stim- 
ulate those needful qualities of mind that are 
sluggish and poorly developed. And this is 
always, to some extent at least, a new environ- 
ment ; but it is not one that means consent to 
laziness or shirking of duties or the humor- 
ing of unworthy ambitions or whims. 

While children have the natural right to 
grow up under conditions that will contribute 
to their most symmetrical development, even 
if it is away from their natural protectors, so 
parents have certain natural rights as to their 
children, and one of these is the right not to 
be crazed by them. If they feed, clothe, warm, 
shelter, protect, and educate their children, 
that is enough, unless more can be done with 
mutual benefit. To give also their own peace 
of mind and even sanity is too large a gift, 
and it is not required. It is especially not 
called for, since, when the parent is distracted 
by the child, the latter is sure to be tempera- 
mentally poisoned and more likely ruined by 
the parent's condition. What protects the par- 
ent benefits the child even more. 

A parent has no right to show his low ideals, 
179 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

if he has such, to his child. And children 
usually find out what sort of purposes their 
parents have, even if they try to hide them. 
It is a rare man who can always hide his 
base purposes from his child; he is sure to 
forget some day and blunder into a revela- 
tion that the child will see through in an in- 
stant. I once saw a man step up to the box 
office of a show with his son and ask what a 
ticket would cost for a nine-year-old boy. 
" Ten years, papa," said the boy in a low tone. 
And when his father did not correct it he 
shouted with evident conscience : " Ten years, 
papa ! " The father was trying to get a 
cheaper ticket by means of a cheap decep- 
tion, and evidently had not posted the boy. 
The latter thought his father had made a mis- 
take — later he must have divined, to his own 
degradation of soul, that it was a very small 
cheat. Few child memories can be more pre- 
cious to a man than those of the high ideals 
and frank honesty of his parents. 

The contentions of this paper would be 
sure, some of them, to meet with doubt and 
denial from most of the inmates of tranquil 
and unperturbed households; for most good 
people believe laudably in the home life for 
children, as I do ; and they usually think it im- 
possible (as I do not) that such a life, ani- 
180 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

mated by the good intentions of all concerned, 
can ever work badly for children or parents. 
They are ready to demand that children of 
susceptible ages shall be taken away from in- 
temperate, cruel, and immoral parents. Some 
would even take them away from irreligious 
ones. But that well-meaning children may be 
taken away from parents of the highest order 
of good morals and the most superb parental 
devotion — and with benefit to both — seems so 
absurd to them that they find it difficult to treat 
the proposition seriously. Yet, if they will 
look about them with their eyes wide open, 
and if they will study the personal history of 
their own times a little, they will find hun- 
dreds of cases where, on one pretext or an- 
other, this very thing has been done. The rea- 
son given in a particular case may be the 
invalidism of the mother, or some theory of 
the father, or the irritation from contact with 
other children ; or the boy or girl has begged 
to go away to school or to go off on a visit, 
and has been gratified; or the boy has run 
away from home and after roaming awhile 
has come back, and then been sent away from 
home or to work — or, what is often the case, 
the nervous skeleton in the family has been 
kept hidden from all but intimates of the 
household, and some other and factitious ex- 
181 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

cuse has been given for the child's going away 
into new influences. 

Every such instance is an argument in favor 
of the claims here made, as it is a plea for a 
frank study of this whole subject without 
blinking the facts. The trouble with the ob- 
jectors is that they unconsciously feel bound 
to make the facts harmonize with their the- 
ories, which is wrong. Theories, to be good, 
must grow out of the facts, and there can be 
no more impropriety in studying this subject 
scientifically than there is in thus dealing with 
indigestion or headache. The wrong comes 
if our study is disloyal to the best interests of 
child or parent or the community as a whole ; 
and loyalty to child and parent can never be 
disloyalty to society. 

Enlightened communities have had to come 
to several new notions in the care of the 
mentally unfortunate; they will come to the 
ground here contended for, or something akin 
to it, after they get over the shock of its ap- 
parent absurdity. (They now often act upon 
it, but refuse to confess that they do.) The 
change will probably come slowly — but it will 
come, as sure as fate, or we shall outgrow the 
necessity for it. And the necessity for it lies 
in our highly wrought and extremely artificial 
lives. For a full century in this country our 
182 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

lives have been growing more artificial and in- 
volved rather than less so, with only occasional 
evidences of a tendency to return to more nor- 
mal and simple ways. 

Among the most hopeful recent symptoms 
in this direction are the fashion of athletics 
among the youth of the land during the last 
two decades, and the later and growing cult 
for outdoor life and more house ventilation. 
These influences tend toward physical vigor 
and the worship of it, and so are helpful in a 
high degree. 

There was a time when it was thought to be 
a cruelty to the insane to take them away from 
their homes and friends. Now every in- 
formed person knows the absurdity of that 
idea. The insane of every degree are always 
benefited by life among strangers. There is 
substantially no exception to this rule. In 
former times the families of these unfor- 
tunates, usually with the best intentions, treat- 
ed them in the way that harmed them most. 
There probably is not in all the history of 
mankind a more pathetic example than this, 
of personal devotion doing injury to the ob- 
ject of its care. A near approach to it, how- 
ever, is our mistreatment of some of the most 
deserving of our children. 

Mentally aberrant children and parents, 

183 



SOME UNCONCEDED RIGHTS 

leagues this side of true insanity as it is un- 
derstood, but peculiar, erratic, and often in- 
tense and nervously prostrate, are subject to 
the same laws of cause and cure as the really 
insane are. And they stand as much in need 
of an enlightened love that will do the best 
things for them, even if at first blush they 
seem to be unnatural things. 

The claim of parents that they cannot spare 
their children, that it is the parent's place to 
take care of his children and keep them, is 
good enough for the normal, wholesome peo- 
ple who are unharmed by too much civiliza- 
tion, or by generations of intense competition. 
It is a very bad claim for the warped, abnor- 
mal people who are victims of our artificial 
and intense ways of living and working. 

For a parent to say that he cannot spare 
his child out of his sight, even for the child's 
good, is to plead guilty to a love that is almost 
purely selfish; and that is a terrible confes- 
sion to make. Some of the very people who 
make this plaint see their children but a small 
portion of the time; most of their waking 
hours the children spend in school, with other 
children, and in the care of nurses and tutors, 
often to their considerable benefit; rarely to 
their harm. A father or mother with a strong 
tendency to parental indulgence, or with 
184 



OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN 

marked irritability, is less safe as a child's 
care-taker than the good teacher or nurse. 
The teacher and the nurse are more likely to be 
discreetly kind and helpful. And it is the nat- 
ural right of every child to have from its care- 
takers that order of kindness that is discreet 
and truly helpful; for that is the sort that 
works for its lifelong, possibly its eternity- 
long, benefit, even if it violates some selfish 
theories and causes some evanescent heart- 
aches. The best friend of the child is that one 
who will most help him to a normal and fine 
development of himself, and to a wholesome 
and symmetrical career in life. And that 
friend most deserves his thanks, whether it 
be his father, his mother, or his neighbor, 



185 



The Trained Nurse and the 
Larger Life 



The Trained Nurse and the 
Larger Life 



A Graduation Address 

In making a formal address on an occasion 
like this, there is something of a temptation 
to indulge in the common platitudes; to glo- 
rify the nurse's calling ; to enlarge on the fact 
that this is a great epoch in the lives of the 
graduates; to romance a little on the very 
proper theory that they are destined, in the 
practice of their profession, to bring joy into 
the lives of unnumbered sick folks and 
through them into numberless other lives ; that 
they have a true missionary work before them, 
and that they are, by their character and de- 
meanor, sure to uphold the standard of their 
guild and to bring honor to their alma mater. 
The list of beautiful and sweet things of this 
kind that might be said, and said with the 
utmost propriety, could be much prolonged. 
189 



THE TRAINED NURSE 

They are pleasant things to say and to hear, 
and they might be said to-night ungrudgingly 
and with perfect truth. 

But these are the superficial and more ob- 
vious things to say; they voice the first im- 
pressions of a graduation-day ceremonial, and 
they are always proper and in good form. 
Moreover, they are easy things to say. A 
deeper and more philosophic view, however, 
prompts a lot of questions, and sees other and 
maybe larger meanings. 

Notwithstanding recent history, this kind 
of an occasion is relatively novel; twenty-five 
years ago it would have been almost unique; 
fifty years ago it would have been impossible. 
It marks the development of a new order of 
things for women and men, as well as society 
in general ; a step in a real social emancipation 
of our kind. Such an event as this would 
have startled our grandmothers. They were 
debarred from all schools of higher education ; 
and there were no schools of any professional 
equipment for them; they were well fettered 
to tradition. The idea that in the stress 
of sickness and accident people should be 
nursed as well as operated upon and prescribed 
for by trained experts, was in their day only 
just beginning to be discussed. Now it seems 
the most natural thing in the world, and we 
190 



AND THE LARGER LIFE 

wonder it was not discovered before. It has 
lowered the death rate of cities, and it is one 
of the few epoch-making improvements in the 
struggle against death and suffering that were 
initiated in the nineteenth century. The pub- 
lic has come slowly to realize the value of 
trained nurses, and now insists on having 
them. Such innovations develop in a quarter 
of a century that we are apt to forget what 
things are wholly modern and what old. 

And the nurses improve. As a profession 
they have taken on dignity. They are, to be- 
gin with, a selected company. From the day 
a girl first inclines to be a trained nurse she 
becomes the subject of a process of pruning 
and elimination. She has less than fifty per 
cent of certainty to be admitted to a first-class 
school ; and once admitted she has a large per- 
centage of certainty to drop out before her 
graduation. If she is graduated she may fail 
in the most delicate art extant — one that no 
training school can teach her completely — 
the art of adapting herself to the public and 
to the units of society, for her and their good. 
Truly, the graduate trained nurse has reason 
to be proud, especially if her degree comes 
from a school of exacting requirements. 

Who would have thought twenty years ago 
that a school for the education of women to 
191 



THE TRAINED NURSE 

nurse the sick could ever become a department 
of a university? Yet this wonder is fore- 
shadowed by developing events now going on, 
and is likely some day to be realized. 

Some training schools now require a high- 
school certificate for admission to their classes, 
and they put a premium on previous college 
work. It has befallen that at least some of the 
sick need, in their nurses, culture as well as 
neatness and refinement; and that elevating 
companionship and power to instruct and en- 
tertain in a fine way, are often a potent force 
for recovery, when brought to the bedside by 
a fine woman not of the patient's own family. 
Then it is elevating to a patient to have a 
nurse who is his mental and moral superior, 
without assuming to be. He cannot belittle 
her, and she may and often does elevate him. 

These high-standard training schools have 
made another discovery, namely, that a good 
preliminary education creates for a girl a poise 
and woman's self-control (and therefore 
safety as a pupil in training) at least three 
years earlier in life than these qualities could 
be sure to come solely by the march of time. 
It is usually absurd to keep an academic grad- 
uate in moral quarantine for a score of moons, 
meditating on her well-earned diploma, till her 
twenty-three years have caught up with her 
192 



AND THE LARGER LIFE 

attainments, before she can enter a training 
school of the right sort. The age condition 
of entrance to the older schools is probably 
justifiable, considering the grade of pupils 
which their low educational conditions are lia- 
ble to bring them, for at all costs there must 
be some maturity of viewpoint and personal 
reliability in every pupil, and twenty-three 
will usually bring these. But real education 
hastens them, crowds them into the earlier 
years, and develops maturity. It helps to wis- 
dom, if it does not create it. 

There is another phase of this subject 
that is of surpassing interest. The training 
schools are both a cause and an evidence of 
certain great changes in the estimate of all 
classes of people, as to the place of the true 
woman in society, and as to what the true 
woman really is. These shiftings affect 
women more than men, but only a little more, 
for the new masculine estimate of women con- 
stitutes nearly, if not quite, half of the move- 
ment. And the movement has been a steady, 
slow, pervading increase in the opportunities 
to women to do things, and in the belief of the 
world in their larger rights and powers to do 
things. 

The trained nurses are an evidence of the 
change, for without some amelioration of the 
193 



THE TRAINED NURSE 

former severe popular standards the nurses 
never could have entered to the degree they 
have into the good opinion and the service of 
the public. And no one who has watched 
their successful work and the maintenance of 
their position — sometimes in the face of grave 
obstacles — can doubt that they have also 
helped to produce the change. 

Time was, in this country, and not so very 
long ago, when woman was vastly more re- 
stricted in her social and legal rights and in 
her activities than she is now. This is fa- 
miliar, almost contemporaneous, history. Then 
she was under the constant protection of the 
male members of her family. She was chape- 
roned, hidden, metaphorically veiled, and pro- 
tected — she was unable to protect herself. Her 
fields of activity were few, and in these she 
was expected to be active, especially if they 
were in the sphere of hard work. But some- 
times, then as now, her sphere was to be idle 
and ornamental, and she was relatively igno- 
rant of the essential facts of the commoner 
knowledge of the world. Any attempt to en- 
large her scope was a suggestion of some 
defection in her character. Even to try to be- 
come greatly educated was mannish — fla- 
grantly so, if she would fill her head with the 
facts of the world, like animal physiology and 
194 



AND THE LARGER LIFE 

pathology. By the previous standards women 
must be ignorant, like the slaves of old, with 
the difference that the women must be chap- 
eroned. A woman was held not to need much 
education, and much education was thought 
to lessen her charms. And what education 
soever she had must be as ethereal and orna- 
mental as possible. Less than twenty years 
ago a course in domestic science was intro- 
duced into the curriculum of an academy for 
girls in New England, and was condemned as 
a sacrilege by numerous critics, not a few of 
whom were educators themselves. They said 
it would degrade and belittle the noble thing 
called woman's education. 

Some of these old prejudices still linger 
even with us, and promise to linger long. In 
our marriage ceremonies, for example, the 
bride is often " given away," a relic of the 
time when she was given away indeed, with or 
without her consent, as is still the case in the 
Orient. 

Innocency was of old the highest attribute 
of excellence of woman, especially of a young 
woman — as it must continue to be forever. 
But the old doctrine made it synonymous with 
ignorance, and to that this latter-day awaken- 
ing demurs, and says that to be innocent of 
wrong is not necessarily to be kept in ignor- 
195 



THE TRAINED NURSE 

ance of any truth of nature — but that the 
truths of the universe help rather than hin- 
der in that kind of rectitude that constitutes 
a real virtue and a character worth having. 

Even now, after we have conceded more re- 
sponsibility as well as liberty to woman, we 
often pretend to ourselves that she is still ig- 
norant, as though that might in some way 
make us more sure of her immaculateness. 
Many of our customs still testify to this de- 
ception, and we cling to certain of them with 
great tenacity, and in utter disregard of their 
relative usefulness. If it is proposed that a 
social restriction or custom of women shall 
be made less severe, the more timid of our 
monitors of ethics are liable to hold up their 
hands in horror and declare that the foun- 
dations of social order are in peril. 

An absurd incident in point occurred in 
rural New England during the early decades 
of the last century. It was given me by my 
mother, of sacred memory, and occurred in 
her own girlhood observation. A woman in 
her town adopted a new fashion, then just 
being heard of as coming into vogue in the 
cities, and was at once pounced upon by most 
of the neighboring women for having done 
something which they thought was out of 
character. She was scorned as much as one 
196 



AND THE LARGER LIFE 

of these trained nurses would be should she 
walk a public street in daylight smoking a 
cigar. It was my grandmother who, in her 
independent sense of justice, and to show her 
contempt for the ungenerous criticism, pro- 
ceeded straightway to adopt the fashion her- 
self. 

What was the fashion? It was proper by 
every criterion save that of its novelty, and 
it was in the highest sense hygienic and com- 
fortable. We can smile at the mixture of con- 
servatism and prudery with which the neigh- 
bors felt outraged, and declare that such 
foolish judgments shall never enter into our 
estimate of the conduct of others; but it was 
unavoidable to them, and we are not wholly 
free from danger of similar blunders. The 
fashion that shocked those prim dames was 
the wearing of drawers by women. This gar- 
ment, it seems, had never been worn before 
by any woman of that section of the country, 
and the innovation was a shock. In a year 
or two the fashion had very properly spread 
to nearly every household in the community. 
The women came to their senses. 

This episode shows in a grotesque way how 
foolish the human genus can be; how it may 
act without really thinking. This first inno- 
vating woman was taunted with not only wear- 
197 



THE TRAINED NURSE 

ing the garments of men, but with having de- 
signs on the vocations and prerogatives of 
men as well, and with being immodest. And 
I should like to be sure that no person in this 
audience is this moment censuring me for bad 
taste in having related this incident. I wish 
I knew that all of us had put away most of our 
prudery. 

The trained nurse, like the college woman 
graduate, has helped to a public avowal that 
women may acquire any and all knowledge, 
and indulge in numerous physical and social 
activities, and not be coarsened by them. 
There is a wholesome and a growing class of 
the better people who refuse to see in waspish 
waists, untanned faces, mental insipidity, and 
general uselessness, the marks of the admi- 
rable in womanhood. They see the admirable 
rather in outdoor color, good muscles, capac- 
ity to do things, knowledge and courage to 
inquire, a sane independence, self-respect and 
good fellowship. These are coming to be 
reckoned among the marks of character and 
worth ; and the career of the trained nurse has 
helped to cultivate the better public opinion. 
With her, to be sensible has come to be fash- 
ionable ; the people have learned to regard her 
as incapable of the commoner forms of femi- 
nine nonsense. Fancy, if you can, a graduate 
198 



AND THE LARGER LIFE 

of a first-class training school or of a univer- 
sity wearing a tight corset or foolish shoes 
or gloves, or powdering away the rich tan 
color of her face ; or simpering. 

I think this very reputation for wholesome- 
ness is one of the incentives that cause many 
young women to enter training schools. Who, 
in selecting a course of education, would not 
be glad to find that one which would take him 
for life into a company respected for its voca- 
tion, and honored in the community? We 
join secret orders and strive to get into coveted 
social sets for similar reasons. 

No student of sociology can doubt that the 
changes here referred to have benefited the 
community as a whole. They are especially 
of value to men by enhancing the man's es- 
timate of the true woman, and enlarging his 
belief in her capacity and powers; and these 
changes have come about in no small degree 
because men have been cared for by trained 
nurses. The man as a patient may have 
been rather startled at first at the idea of 
a young nurse taking charge of him and 
administering to his every want for restora- 
tion to health. But the experience has usually 
ended by his having a higher opinion of the 
worth of the real woman. This influence has 
been a useful leaven that has worked power- 
199 



THE TRAINED NURSE 

fully; and no one can know of the value of 
this force so well as a physician who is for- 
tunate enough to have seen the old regime 
changed to the new, and to have practiced 
under both. Having had that experience, such 
an one knows the facts, for the facts are 
patent to all the seniors in the profession with 
a general metropolitan practice. 

Another influence for the betterment of the 
standing of the graduate nurse, and through 
her of womankind everywhere, is the admi- 
rable character which, with hardly an excep- 
tion, these nurses have maintained. I venture 
to say that the graduates of no college for 
women have a record for probity, efficiency, 
kindliness, and general woman's character su- 
perior to that of the graduates of the high- 
class training schools for nurses in this coun- 
try. These graduates have demonstrated, 
what even women critics themselves do not 
doubt, that a young woman may be trusted to 
her own chaperonage without a breath of sus- 
picion from anybody. And that is an achieve- 
ment that marks an epoch. 

To what is this consummation probably due ? 
Undoubtedly in large measure to the rigid se- 
lection of the personnel of the student body of 
the training schools. If superior women are 
selected for training, superior graduates may 
200 



AND THE LARGER LIFE 

be expected ; but you cannot, in any three or 
four years of training, make a refined lady 
out of a girl who is devoid of some essential 
refinement in her nature. These are axioms, 
but wholesome to be repeated now and then. 
It is, however, positive that a large part of 
the peculiar superiority of the graduates is due 
to the very nature of their drill and work. 
Think of what the work is, and of its spiritual 
influence. From the beginning to the end of 
her course the pupil must have the weal, for 
comfort and health and even life, of others 
as her constant care and duty. Her service 
is essentially one of unselfishness, and she has 
little time or encouragement for trifling aims. 
She knows that the eyes of the public, the 
doctors, her teachers, her fellows, and the pa- 
tients are upon her. The strain upon her is 
so severe that at first it is often extremely try- 
ing to the health of the pupil, more so than has 
been witnessed in any other sort of school for 
women in the history of the world — sometimes 
it destroys her health completely; but if she 
does not break, she rises high in power and 
efficiency as her training goes on. The pa- 
tients may look to her for strength and com- 
fort — they sometimes lean on her in sorrow, 
and this is an influence that usually makes 
even crude human nature grow in grace. 
201 



THE TRAINED NURSE 

Then, the nurse in the absence of the doctor 
is solely responsible for the patient, and in 
some measure she shares his responsibility 
also, and sometimes her part of it is appalling. 
She shares with the physician the duty to hold 
the interests and secrets of the patients as in- 
violable. A mistake at her hands is not a sim- 
ple classroom blunder — it may cause a death. 
If she can bear all this responsibility, the thing 
happens that comes in the experience of most 
human beings under similar strain : she stands 
erect and grows in poise and moral stature; 
temptations to littleness and meanness grow 
fewer, and her vision of the real worth of hu- 
man character grows broader and more accu- 
rate. She learns what is the dross of human 
nature, to be rejected and forgotten as soon as 
possible, and what the virtues to tie to and 
be encouraged by. And her appreciation of 
childhood and flowers and music and all clean- 
ness enlarges rather than lessens; her judg- 
ments grow more temperate and sane — and 
so she makes a career worth living for and 
worth dying for. And she often finally dies 
in the belief that she has been a poor forgotten 
cog in a great wheel, whose parts are easily 
replaced, instead of what she truly is, a potent 
influence toward the betterment of women 
and men the world over. 
202 



AND THE LARGER LIFE 

The graduates here present are about to 
enter a new profession, that has been born out 
of a new and better dispensation, and has 
grown to honor within the memory of most 
of them. It is no small achievement to have 
done this. If the event is not sufficiently novel 
to be surprising, it is ground for congratula- 
tion that they stand where they do to-day as a 
result of work and trial and struggle and per- 
haps grief — and after severe natural and fac- 
titious selection. If anyone thinks that the 
struggle was not hard enough and the selec- 
tion not sufficiently severe, let him understand 
that probably their successors will find these 
progressively more terrible. This is the first 
harvest of these graduates — the second will 
be their professional success, if that shall ever 
come to pass. 

The greater fact is that they to-day enter a 
company of women who have been educated 
in a new kind of knowledge, and a new art, 
which is of the greatest usefulness for any 
woman in any work or walk of life. It will 
be enormously valuable to every one of them, 
even should she never do a day's work of 
nursing outside of her own home. Besides, 
it gives them the ability to look down, little 
or much, on most of other womankind. Van- 
ity and conceit over this fact would be unbe- 
203 



THE TRAINED NURSE 

coming anyway, and such an ignoble emotion 
will be smothered when they reflect, as they 
must, that, whether they pursue the profession 
or not, they have a large responsibility which 
they can never evade so long as they live, to 
maintain that reputation of their guild which 
their predecessors have already placed high, 
to the end that woman may have larger lib- 
erties and opportunities, and may earn more 
honor, with no harm but always benefit to the 
social life of the race. 

Nor are good nursing and good conduct 
enough for this duty that is upon them. They 
are a living proclamation that women, espe- 
cially this stamp of women, shall also know 
somewhat. And knowledge accumulates and 
changes with time. They cannot and must not 
stop in their intellectual growth. They must 
read, observe, and think, and increase in wis- 
dom as knowledge advances. 



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